Splinter
by xcgirl08
Summary: To Anna, it seemed simple enough on paper: answer the summons, appear before the king's court, tell the truth as best as she remembered it, go back home, and never visit the Southern Isles again. But, of course, a princess is only as good as the challenges she can meet. And with a sorceress as its queen, Arendelle may be in for several.
1. Chapter 1

**Something multi-chapter, I hope, with a bit of character study, conflict, and magic to spice things up. Open to suggestions, but it probed its way out of my brain and here we are.**

**Frozen and its characters belong to Disney, which I am far too old to be writing fan fiction for. **

* * *

Shortly before dawn, Anna woke from a dream of snow and ice and shattering steel to find that her cabin's fire had gone out.

She lay still for a moment, eyes open, listening to the ship creak around her as waves thumped against the hull. The salty air made her skin feel damp, so she reached up a hand to wipe her face. It took another few moments for her pulse to slow down. She pressed the other hand over her heart.

But she'd woken up in a bed, instead of at the bottom of the sea, so that made it a decent morning so far.

"Right," she said. "Good perspective."

Then Anna drew the quilt around her like a cloak, pulled on her boots, and fumbled through the blue-black darkness to dress herself. A few embers glowed in the wood stove, and maybe she could've stirred them up to a blaze again, but down here the ceiling was too low and the windows were too small and the water was too close.

She missed a hook in her corset, two buttons on her bodice. By the time it came to fixing her hair, however, Anna's hands were reasonably steady: then she regarded her reflection in the washbasin, frowned, and knotted both braids together before pinning them up at the base of her neck.

_("I should be coming with you,"_ Elsa had said, three days earlier. _"I'm the queen. I should be delivering the testimony."_

"_No, it's alright. Don't worry about me. At least their courts let women bring the charges themselves, right? We should make that a law here too. You should make that a law."_ She'd reached out and taken her sister's hands. _"And getting the princess of Arendelle instead of the queen as a guest isn't such a bad trade-off, is it?"_)

"Right," she repeated.

A cover of fog had crept in overnight, but was starting to lift when she poked her head above deck fifteen minutes later. Anders, the chief mate, approached her with a lantern in one hand and a bowl of barley porridge in the other.

"Good morning, Princess." He nodded his head. "I didn't expect you to be awake this early. Have you come to take the second navigation watch for me?"

"Good morning! And, well, I'll try if you really want me to. You could probably use the sleep." Anna wrung her hands, accepting the porridge as he offered it to her. "Elsa and I used to race model ships across the garden pond when we were kids, where we'd stand on the shore and pull them across with some string. I got pretty good at it after a while, except for one time when I crashed mine into a duck. But I don't think there are many giant ducks to run into out here, right?"

Anders stared at her. "I should say not, milady."

She took a large spoonful of the porridge. "Ah we cloff yeh?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Sorry." She swallowed. "Whew, that's hot. I said, are we close yet?"

He pulled a pocket watch from his coat – Anna had spent the previous day winding its key and springing the latch before declaring it a work of either mechanical genius or magic – to check the hour. "We should put into port just after sunrise, milady. Hopefully we can keep this west wind behind us."

"You think we will?"

"Doesn't matter much what I think, milady. You won't need to be concerned either way." He glanced up into the rigging. "No use worrying over bad winds if you can adjust your sails to meet them."

"I haven't heard that saying before. Is that even a saying? I feel like it should be a saying."

"Maybe it should. A naval officer told me that last time I was in the Southern Isles."

"Ah-ha. That's appropriate." She ate another mouthful of porridge. It burned her tongue, but she swallowed it against the hard knot in her throat. "When was that?"

Anders polished the face of his watch with an oil cloth. "When was what?"

"The last time you were in the Southern Isles. When was that?"

A crease formed between his gray brows. "Early this past spring, milady. For King Magnus's wedding. Your sister sent a pot of flowers I was asked to deliver along with a freight of timber. Do you remember?"

The flowers had been freshly grown lady-of-the-snow violets. The gift itself had been Elsa's idea, because she'd needed to hurry them along through a stiff March frost, but Anna had been the one to suggest presenting them in a little box made of ice.

"Right, sure. I remember that. Was everyone, uh, amiable toward you?"

"Amiable, milady?"

"Friendly, I mean. Pleasant, cheerful, sanguine, magnanimous." Well, there was that look again. "Did his wife like the present, at least?"

"I don't know, I'm afraid. I didn't give your flowers to the queen myself." He leaned in slightly. The oil lantern whined on its hinge. "They treated me with about as much courtesy as they should've, if that's what's troubling you."

"That's good. " Anna just missed dropping a lump of porridge on her shoe. "That's really good."

_("I don't like that you're going by yourself,"_ Kristoff had frowned. "_I mean, why do you have to be there in person? Can't they take your word in writing? Or just fling rotten tomatoes at him in the city square and be done with it?"_

She'd wanted to take his hands too, but he'd kept them tucked into his pockets the whole time. They held the tension between them like a piece of gold wire.

"_Hey, now. If there's going to be any rotten-tomato-throwing business, I should be first in line. Or maybe they'll let me punch him in the face again. How 'bout that? I think that'd make it worth the trip."_)

She walked to the starboard-side bow, stepping carefully as though the unsteady deck underfoot would spook. A thin line of gray light began to brighten up the east, turning to first pink and then orange, and by the time the fog lifted altogether she could make out a strip of land in the distance.

Arendelle, she'd often thought, was pretty small to be called a kingdom. It fit snugly up against the steep hillsides, circled all around by the mountains and the fjord like a child sitting in its parent's lap.

Not that Anna had much in the way of comparison, of course, because she'd never been anywhere else, but she'd spent the last six months learning more about the Southern Isles than she had in the previous nineteen years put together.

It was colored yellow on all the maps. The facts were listed in square, black font: consolidated, 1397 AD. Main exports: grain, cattle, iron. Colonies: St. Croix and St. Thomas in the Caribbean, Sempore and Trankebar in India. Weather: damp, mild. Reigning monarch: King Frederic of House Oldenburg. His heirs were listed underneath by order of birth: Prince Magnus, Prince Niels, Prince Erik, Prince Gustav, Prince Kristian, Prince Adolph, Prince Ludwig, Prince Albert, Prince Siegfried, Prince Harold, Prince Elias, and Prince Kay. The first five names had been written in gold, the other seven in purple.

(The book in question, naturally, had been written before it could be noted that King Frederic was dead, leaving both the crown and a bankrupted realm to his eldest son. Anna had taken it upon herself to record that information, scribbling it into the margin along with one last name in red ink below all the rest.

There might've also been the doodle of a face added, one bearing a pair of sideburns and a set of curved horns sprouting from its temples, but Anna admitted no knowledge of that afterwards.)

Out of these names and images, she'd managed to create something like a picture of what the Southern Isles would look like: vast, crowded, overbearing, gray, narrow streets trodden to mud by the hooves of animals led into slaughterhouses. But as the ship beat itself forward against an outgoing tide, she watched the shadow of land become green hills and cliffs and houses, flags lifting themselves up over the rooftops to greet her.

And it was small, Anna realized. From this distance she could cover it from sight with one hand.

_("I do hereby request the presence of her highness, Princess Anna of Arendelle," _the letter had stated, bearing King Magnus's seal,_ "and her appearance before the assembled magistrates and nobility of the Southern Isles on June 13__th__, day of Saint Antony of Padua, to act as chief witness in the criminal trial of Prince Hans Frederic Westerguard of House Oldenburg."_

"_So that's his last name," _Anna had remarked, after the letter was read aloud to their counselors_. "No wonder he never told me.")_

Something within her seemed to be winding itself up, pulling tighter-tighter-tighter like a spool of thread being gathered in, and Anna considered wishing for the wind to change. But that would be rude, and discourteous to the men who'd stayed awake all night to see her safely into harbor, so she decided not to.

The ship gave a hard tilt. Anna tightened a hand around the railing.

Soon they were close enough that she could see the bright patterns of the flags, and the individual faces of people milling about in the marketplace. It did seem crowded, at least.

"Right."

She glanced down into her porridge bowl, realized that she had no appetite anyway, and dumped the rest of it overboard.

* * *

Two men stood waiting for her at the docks.

They wore blue double-breasted military jackets and matching swords at their sides, and though the weather was warm Anna suddenly felt reassured in her choice of dress: high-collared, narrow-sleeved, dark green skirts swirling about her ankles without the fuss of pleats or bows or lace petticoats. And as she stepped down the gangplank, Anders walking close behind her, she made sure to stomp her boots just a bit.

"Princess Anna of Arendelle has honored us by coming." The older of the two soldiers, with a large blond beard covering most of his face, extended a broad hand. "My name is Jens. This is Klaus. King Magnus has asked us to be your escorts."

"It's very nice to –," Anna halted halfway through dropping into a curtsy of her own. "I mean, thank you. Sirs."

Klaus, the younger of the two by several years, stepped forward next. "May I see your summons, Princess?"

"Sure. They're, um, here." As she drew the papers from one sleeve, wind snatched at the top few sheets. She jumped to catch them. "Right here."

Klaus and Jens paused to read the papers over. Anders spoke with the dock master and ordered workers to carry down her traveling valises.

Anna could name at least a few of the larger sailing ships anchored in the yard, including a three-masted nave that flew a French flag. That one had probably brought the other dignitaries here, she figured, and the barque with pennants of red and black had likely carried in the Duke of Weselton. She counted two brigantines, three frigates, and a twelve-gun sloop before she got bored.

Several fishermen hurried by with full nets, and Anna looked again at the people.

Women moved about the clean, swept streets selling food and wares, while men stood in groups of three or four and stepped absentmindedly aside to let children run past. Crowded, she thought again. Especially for an early morning.

"Excuse me," Anna said. "But is there a festival going on? It seems awful busy. I didn't forget the king's birthday or something, did I?"

Klaus looked at her, stamped the papers, and rolled them up into his belt. "Oh, no, don't mind them. It's just that…Hold on. Jens, when did the court sentence Ragnar?"

Jens frowned.

"Ragnar the Red? Let me think. King Frederic's second wife was still alive, wasn't she? I'd say it's been a good thirty-five years or so."

"That's right, and we all took a holiday for Prince Albert's birth the next week." Jens turned to leave, indicating that Anna would walk between them while the rest of her procession followed. "You'll have to forgive them a little excitement, milady. It's been a long time since this city got to watch a public beheading."

Anna stopped.

She wasn't sure if she'd heard him correctly, and for a moment her pulse threw black spots up in front of her vision.

Snow, she thought. Ice. Shattering steel. A cold fire, fading embers, a bare hand touching her face through the dark.

Snow, ice, shattering steel.

When her heart didn't slow down, she tried a few breaths instead. "He's not – the trial hasn't been held yet. They shouldn't, um, be waiting for anything, should they?"

"Yes, milady. Of course." Jens and Klaus began to walk in a matched stride, but continued conversing over Anna's head. "I hear Weselton just hangs them nowadays. What do you think of that?"

"A short drop and a sudden stop." Klaus shook his head. "Too easy, if you ask me."

* * *

**Fandom consensus is that the Southern Isles are meant to roughly represent Denmark, while Arendelle is in Norway. Denmark executed its last prisoner via decapitation in 1882, while the style of dress and architecture (forgiving an understandable lack of firearms) places the movie's events roughly around the 1840s. ****Andersen's story "The Snow Queen" was also published in 1845, so there's that. **

**I'll probably be fudging things a little and stirring the anachronism stew quite a bit. Most of the important plot points should already be set in place...****Also, I still have a hard time believing that the same film gave us both a character ready and willing to murder a defeated woman and a talking, pun-stuffed snowman. Consolidation and tone will be difficult.**

**Questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, ideas, and critiques are all welcome. Thank you for reading.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Greetings again. I had this one mostly finished, so it was an unusually short gap between chapters. **

**I own neither Disney nor Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," which is referenced and quoted several times here. You'll know it when you see it. **

* * *

When Anna was almost thirteen, they had brought a man to her father for judgment.

Mama had given specific orders that Anna be confined to her room until the sentencing was finished, had even turned the lock herself to be sure. Mama kept a key for every room in the castle, as befitted a lady of the house, and Anna listened at the door until her mother's jangling, silvery step faded.

Then Anna patted her hands along a wall, curled small fingers around the entrance to an unused servant's stairwell where it was concealed by wallpaper – as befitted a future lady of the house, who should know that all rooms can be opened from both sides – and slipped down into the dark.

(Elsa had neither received nor required any similar direction, of course.)

The man wore manacles on his wrists and feet, which dragged as they half-carried him across the polished floor and dropped him before Papa's throne. Both of the soldiers who accompanied the man wore gloves; Gerda had once told her it was bad luck to touch someone if they were condemned or dying.

But as Anna looked out at him from behind a curtain, even from a distance, she had thought he was very young. Certainly far too young to be dying, in any case. That seemed a more suitable future for the older man who walked in behind the others. His sallow was face deeply creased around the mouth, his knuckles formed into claws with age and hard work.

"State your name," Papa said to the kneeling man. He sat with his back very straight. One fist clutched his scepter. "How do you present yourself as a defendant?"

"Most excellent king and sovereign lord," the man answered, "My name is Leif Abrahamsen."

Papa pointed to the older man next, who stood by without a word and seemed to have trouble staying still. He kept swaying and bobbing on his feet, like a blade of grass, so that Anna worried he might fall.

"Do you know this man?"

Leif Abrahamsen laughed with his head thrown back. "Hardly something I'm like to forget, your majesty."

One soldier reached out and struck the man across his face with a gauntleted hand. A sharp sound cracked against the walls and ceiling, and the man who called himself Leif Abrahamsen spat a mouthful of blood onto the shining white floor.

"Do you know this man, Leif Abrahamsen?" Papa asked again.

"Yes, your majesty." The throne room seemed so quiet that Anna thought she might have been able to hear the tiny, patterned _drip-drip-drip_ of blood as it ran down his chin. "He's my father."

Her own father did not seem to notice the blood, because here he turned his head slightly left towards the curtain where Anna was hiding.

And it was only for a moment, it was only the most imperceptible shift of a gaze, but Anna suddenly wanted to draw the curtains closer around herself because his eyes were different then, his eyes were strange: because those were not Papa's eyes and thus they had to be the eyes of someone else.

His voice seemed different, too, when next he spoke.

"He has said that during the third week of this November past, you killed Mikael Abrahamsen in a dispute over stolen livestock. Do you know a man by that name?"

"Oh, is this a questions game? I should get to ask the next one," Leif Abrahamsen snapped, blood spraying through his lips. He'd bitten his tongue. "Of course I know him. He was my brother. I'd get to cut up one filthy pig in exchange for another, I told him."

Her father stood, unfolding himself from the throne in a smooth motion.

He wore his black general's coatee, the epaulettes square across his shoulders, the heavy brass medals draped over his heart. In a vast room of clean whites and golds and that one splash of bright red his darkness seemed small and alone, but Anna found that she could look at nothing else.

(And Anna would've asked that her father be buried in those clothes, two years later, if there had been anything to bury.)

"Do you then contest the convictions brought against you, Leif Abrahamsen?"

More silence followed. Anna could feel the percussion of a heartbeat all the way into her fingertips. She covered herself completely with the curtain, because she did not want see Leif Abrahamsen's face when he gave his answer, but she could still hear the redness dripping between his teeth.

"No, your majesty. I don't."

"Then I do charge you with murder," her father said, "and sentence you to death."

And it was not the convicted man who began to cry, then, but the old man who stood and swayed behind him. He cried in big gulps and sobs as though he would suffocate on the force of his own grief.

That was nothing Anna wanted to see, either.

So she ran out from behind the curtain, back along the halls, up the blackened staircase, through the door that swung both ways, and when Mama came to unlock the room again she found Anna sitting by the window, pulling stitches out of her embroidery work with a little steel seam ripper and letting the scraps of red thread fall into her lap.

* * *

The Palace of Justice – not a real creative name, Anna would admit, but that might've been as good as a group of southern islands that called themselves 'The Southern Isles' could do – was actually a cluster of buildings on the south side of the city.

Two channels came in from the sea and divided the city roughly in half. Both were crossed by great, arched bridges, built up on wooden pilings, and Anna looked down through their boards to the water below. She could just spot the castle's walls farther east, and to the west a clock tower rang the seventh hour. Its notes went striding over the rooftops like a giant.

"Is it that late already?" Klaus said. He looked at Jens. "I talked to Henrik this morning, by the way. They had him on early watch at the prince's cell. You know what he told me?"

"I can't possibly guess."

"Apparently that cheeky priss wakes him up before sunrise, yeah? Early, anyway. He can hardly see a thing. And you know what the prince asks him?"

"You know I don't, Klaus. I hate when you do that."

"He asks Henrik to bring him a bowl of water and this shaving razor from his private chambers, all quiet and civil-like. Henrik said the razor was some fancy, concave piece of work with a rosewood handle and initials in the steel." Jens rubbed at his own chin, smooth except for a raised scar along his jaw. "The spoiled brat actually wanted to clean himself up for the headsman. Said if he had to die like an animal, at least he shouldn't have to look like one. How about that?"

"That sounds like something he'd say," Anna commented, unthinking.

Klaus laughed. "It certainly is, milady. By the way, did you really agree to marry him after only a day?"

"Klaus – " Jens said.

Anna felt a snap of fear against her chest.

No, no, it was alright. She had a lie prepared for this. She had a list of lies, in fact, numbered and ordered in some neat, tidy compartment of her brain, divided between the ones she'd told herself and the ones she'd told everyone else and the ones that were more like truth at the bottom.

Yes, she thought. Yes, she wanted to say, because it wasn't him I agreed to marry. Because he made me a promise I wanted to hear. Because he offered me his hand, and nobody had done that in forever. Because I didn't realize I was looking at a mirror and falling in love with my own reflection.

Klaus kept talking.

"…Because, see, some of the other men and I took bets a few weeks ago. I said it was impossible, you couldn't have been so taken in by that bootlicking whelp in just a _day_. The others said it was probably because you were real eager to –"

Anders cleared his throat. Jens reached over and gave Klaus a hard shove on the arm.

"Klaus, you are as small-minded as a pigeon. The lady's sister is a sorceress, and the only thing you can think to ask about has to do with possibly losing a few krone."

"Hmpf. Apologies, milady. I forgot where I was." Klaus tipped his shako hat to her. "But I've heard my share of stories about the queen, too. How much of it is true, would you say?"

Anna let out a long breath. This was good. This was nice. This was something she could do. She held a hand over her heart, pressed her fingers in for a moment, before speaking.

"Depends on what they say, I guess."

They wove together through a great square outside the Palace of Justice. The crowds parted for them: lawyers and litigants with minor civil cases to plead, merchants tending their stalls, shoppers, beggars, idlers, teams of horses, crates of chickens loaded on the backs of carts, two girls flying a red kite. And in the center of the square stood an empty wooden scaffold, a layer of fresh sawdust sprinkled over it.

Anna decided to pretend she hadn't seen that.

"They say the queen can turn an ocean to ice," Klaus offered. "I got a chance to look at one of the ships that came back last summer, and its hull had to be broken up for kindling."

"That's because she froze the fjord. I don't think she could do it to the whole ocean." Anna considered for a moment. "And this one time! This one time a Romanian dignitary made her angry, so she froze the tea in everyone's cups. One guy didn't notice and got his lips stuck."

"Gunther went along on the prince's expedition to the mountains. I talked with him after he came back, too. He told me the queen made a monster out of snow and had it come to life."

"Yeah, his name's Marshmallow. He's only grumpy if you bother him too much. He's kind of a sweetheart otherwise."

"My grandmother used to tell me about the snow witches who lived up north, at the top of the world," Jens said. "Can she turn herself into a hundred thousand snowflakes and travel on the wind?"

("_There was once a demon who made a looking glass_," one story went, according to Gerda. Anna knew it by heart. _"This mirror had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless or bad looked increased in size and worse than ever._")

"That one, I don't know about." Anna lifted her skirts to step in a rain puddle. "I'd think the more important trick would be putting yourself back together again afterwards, huh?"

Anders dropped a hand onto her shoulder. He held it there in a firm grip. "Oh, now, don't start getting practical on us, milady."

Anna pursed her lips, nodded, and stayed quiet after that.

_("The demon's students carried the glass about everywhere, till at last there was not a land nor a people who had not been looked at through this distorted mirror."_ At this point in the story Gerda would always look up to where Anna sat, listening. _"They wanted even to fly with it up to heaven to see the angels, but the higher they flew the more slippery the glass became, and they could scarcely hold it, till at last it slipped from their hands, fell to earth, and was broken into millions of pieces."_)

They passed through a stone archway, two double doors that took four men to open, and climbed a staircase up to the Palace of Justice's central hall. It was as wide and long as a courtyard, its vaulted, gilded ceilings resting on a row of columns. The room was filled with lawyers and law clerks and ushers and scribes, all of whom moved aside just as the crowds outside had done. Stained glass windows overhead threw shards of color on the floor.

Portraits of past rulers lined the hall on either side, their faces brightening with color and shadow and depth of expression as Anna walked quickly beneath several hundred years of changing artistic vision, until she lagged a moment beneath the last, newest one.

The king had placed himself at an angle to the painter, garbed in full white military regalia with a broadsword in one hand. There was something in the way he gripped the sword's hilt a bit too tightly, in the width his stance and the bowline curve of his back, so that by the time Anna noticed he had green eyes it came as no surprise whatsoever.

_("When one of these splinters flew into a person's eyes, it stuck there unknown to him, and from that moment he saw everything through a distorted medium, or could see only the worst side of what he looked at, for even the smallest fragment retained the same power which had belonged to the whole mirror.")_

Because I had read too many stories, Anna thought, continuing down her list of answers as she studied the face of Hans's father. Because for a long time the stories were all I had.

"What do you make of it?" came a voice behind her. "I tried to warn him that the broadsword would look overdone."

Anna started. A tall man with sharp, pale features came up and stood beside her. He had fair, wheat-colored hair brushed back to curl just above his collar, silver at the temples and flecked all through his beard, a purple sash draped over his narrow chest. A gold crown rested neatly on his head.

Jens and Klaus both knelt. Anders followed suit.

"I wouldn't necessarily say that, your majesty." Anna really did curtsy this time. "At least he's kind of smiling. My mother always said that my father's portrait made it look like he'd gotten stuck with a pin."

"I'll have remember that when they decide to add my own to the collection." King Magnus gave her a crisp bow in return. "Thank you for coming, Princess Anna. I'm sorry it couldn't be under more pleasant circumstances."

Anna groped for something rote and polite to say as a response. The only thing she could recall was an adage about there being a rotten apple in every basket, which really didn't seem tactful. She might have said it anyway, just to fill the sudden well of silence, when a woman stepped forward to take Anna's hand.

"You are Queen Elsa's sister, yes? She sent me the snow flowers as a wedding present."

"Oh! Um –"

Anna had heard several things about Queen Savitri, but people had apparently left out how young she was: a few years older than Elsa, maybe, dressed in golden brocade, with black hair gathered into a rolled coiffure and skin the color of a brown wren's egg. Her hands were warm even through the lace gloves she wore, so Anna clasped her own around them.

" – Yeah, that's me! The box didn't melt before it got here, did it? Elsa and I were worried about that."

"No, it was very beautiful." A pair of sunstone gems swung from Queen Savitri's ears when she turned her head. "My husband thought it was made of glass."

"Until it dripped on the tablecloth."

She dropped Anna's hands to wave off King Magnus's remark. "The weather was very cold when I came here. I did not think I would see flowers again so soon."

"That's probably why Elsa had the idea. It took some work, but she got them to come up just in time. I mean, she's pretty bad at gardening, obviously, but the farmers have all been really happy about how she's kept the frosts from killing early crops."

Anders touched her shoulder again, though with somewhat more hesitance. "We should go, milady. We're detaining the King and Queen."

"Not at all," Magnus said, taking his wife's arm into the crook of his own. "I'd prefer to put this off as long as possible."

* * *

A narrow passage stemmed them away from the noise of the center hall into a smaller one beyond, an inner sanctum where King Magnus sat to give council. Two canopied thrones stood on a dais at the head of the room, flanked by chairs on either side for the princes, clerics, and laymen. Rows of wood benches lined the other three walls. The floor displayed a tiled, spiraling mosaic meant to look like the face of a compass.

Turning herself around in a tight circle, Anna also realized that its directions were accurate; its southern point fell directly on the king's throne, and the northern arm aimed behind her, across the city and the ocean beyond towards home. People filed in from corner doors.

"Where should we sit?"

"Over there, milady." Jens took her by the shoulders and turned her a few degrees to the left. "Do you see the other witnesses?"

She did. The Duke of Weselton's hawkish profile was hard to miss.

"Ah, Princess Anna," he said, as Anna gathered up her skirts to sit down a row in front of him. "What a pleasant surprise. Tell me, where's your sister?"

She frowned at him, a little bit. The seats were tiered enough that he could manage to look down his nose at her, so Anna tilted back her head to return the compliment.

"They said she didn't need to come. They asked for me instead."

"Did they?" The Duke adjusted his wire-frame glasses. "My, what a surprise. How has the Queen of Arendelle been, lately?"

_("A few of the pieces were so large that they could be used as window panes; it would have been a sad thing to look at our friends through them. Other pieces were made into spectacles. This was dreadful for those who wore them, for they could see nothing either rightly or justly.")_

Anna might have had another adage ready, about the fact that a tied dog should never try to jump farther than his cord, but then the bailiff cleared his throat several times before shouting above the low chatter.

"All rise for his majesty, King Magnus."

In a thudding and clattering of heels, they did.

King Magnus crossed to his place on the dais, one arm still linked with his wife's. Anna leaned against the railing to get a better look at the retinue of men who walked behind him. Names in gold and purple came to mind with each one: Niels, Erik, Gustav, Kristian, Adolph, Ludwig, Albert, Siegfried, Harold, Elias and Kay, admirals and captains and parliament members and dukes of foreign countries and one bishop, which sounded like the beginning of a long joke.

And it was odd, as she studied each face, because while Anna could catch the suggestion of a swooping nose or an angled jaw or green eyes, none of them had that same fox-fur red hair.

She scanned the crowded room one last time.

An older woman in blue silk damask sat to Anna's left, at the far end of her bench. The woman's face was crossed with fine wrinkles beneath the white powder, but her bare shoulders were dusted with freckles. She closed and opened her fan to a quick, punctuating rhythm, _snap-snap-snap-snap, _and maybe she held it a little too firmly, too. Streaks of white ran back through her copper-colored curls.

Ah-ha.

The bishop – Erik, who according to the records had ceded his titles and inheritance, although he had the same curls as King Magnus – stood to ask for God's blessing over the proceedings. Another parliament member rapped his gavel, and the court came into session. A shaped, pressurized silence clapped down over them all like a bell jar.

"Please bring the prisoner in," King Magnus said.

And distantly, from deep within the folds of some dark, quiet softness wrapped around her, Anna watched as they did.

He did not drag his step, because his ankles weren't chained, although both of his wrists were. His face was clean-shaven and his hair trimmed, which Anna supposed was fortunate; she wouldn't have recognized him otherwise.

The bones of his neck and shoulder blades showed sharply through the loose, filthy shirt, as though his whole body had been whittled down with a knife. He wore the same tall black boots as when she'd seem him last, the same dark trousers, and after a second look at the shirt Anna realized that it was the same outfit entirely.

In a fit of what could only be demented whimsy, someone had even thought to put a pair of pristine white gloves on his hands.

And he did not look young at all, Anna thought; he looked old, older than seemed possible, and she remembered that he was five years her senior. He had been eighteen, old enough to marry and to go to war and to be executed for a crime, when she herself had been a girl hiding behind the curtain of her father's throne room while a condemned man dripped out his blood in words.

"Kneel," Magnus ordered.

The tall and fair stranger merely smirked, until his legs were kicked out from under him and he knelt anyway.

Then Hans paused, turned his face towards where Anna sat with the smirk still pulling at his face, and he spread his fingers into what could have been a slight, greeting wave.

_("Some few persons even got a fragment of looking-glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold like a lump of ice."_)

Anna kept both hands folded in her lap and turned her eyes away.

* * *

**Thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed and read so far! Any critiques or comments are always welcome; I don't have pairings in mind yet, so much as I enjoy bouncing these characters off of each other or dropping them into situations and letting them work their way out. We'll see.**

**I'm excited for the next few chapters. **


	3. Chapter 3

**Some meta from Jennifer Lee mentioned that Hans's last name could be considered 'Westerguard,' so I changed that if anyone notices. **

**I do not own Frozen or any part of the Disney franchise. **

* * *

Three days earlier, Anna had been standing on the other side of a closed door.

She always waited a few seconds before walking into Elsa's office, of course; at first Anna figured it was because she needed a moment to convince herself that she wouldn't find Papa sitting there, that he wouldn't glance up from his work to smile at her. Later it may have been a reaction, a moment of surprise, at hearing any response to her tentative knocks. By now it was likely force of habit.

But just in case, she knocked again.

"Elsa?" she called. "Hey, are you done yet? My ship's waiting."

"The door's unlocked."

"Right. Okay." Anna opened it just enough to squeeze through, trying to keep a cup balanced in the other hand. "I brought your tea. I wasn't sure how you'd like it, so I got this jar of honey too. I wanted some sugar cubes, but the scullery maid said we didn't have any."

"Yes, I know. We won't have any more ships from the West Indies until autumn."

Elsa's desk stood in front of a wide tracery window, which looked out over the harbor. She sat with her hair framed all around by pale morning sunlight. Twenty folio-sized volumes containing five hundred years of Arendelle's legal records were stacked in piles around her, the candles puddled in their chambersticks. Ink stained her bare fingers.

"Here." Elsa dropped a glob of red sealing wax on the papers. "I hope these all sound right."

Anna set the tea cup down and thumbed through one of the folios. Its pages breathed out a smell of must. "Did you really have to read all of these?"

"Hmm. Most of them." Elsa tapped her pen against a volume that looked as though it were bound in calf-skin. "This one is about as far back as I can go before the writing turns to Middle Norwegian. I think there's a case here about a lawyer who was asked to defend some rats."

"Well, I guess somebody's got to do it." Anna frowned. "Wait, you mean _literal_ rats?"

"They destroyed a village granary. He won with the defense that you can't change something's nature, so you shouldn't punish them for it either." Elsa lifted the cup and saucer. She blew gently on the tea to cool it, and watched its surface rim over with ice. "They also reversed the sentencing on a woman who was supposed to be a witch because she didn't burn when they poured hot tar on her."

"Hot tar?"

Elsa sipped her tea, one pinkie stuck out. She hadn't used the honey. "I believe that counts as a trial by ordeal."

Anna gathered the papers and folded them into quarters before slipping everything up her sleeve. "Sounds more like a sticky situation, if you ask me."

"Yes, well, they also…" Elsa stopped, eyebrows raised, then muffled a snort in the tea. "You're terrible."

"Sorry. That was completely punintentional."

Elsa took another sip, although her lips were quivering with the effort to remain pursed and serious. "Stop. There's a reason we don't have a court jester anymore, you know."

"I don't. You always said we didn't need one, because I – sheesh, is that light bothering you? Hold on."

The morning light seemed too harsh and glaring, from this standpoint, so Anna walked around Elsa's desk to draw the shades. She pulled on a braided cord that held the curtains in place, and they dropped around her in a rush of shadow.

"There. You should try to get some sleep." Anna tugged at the cord again. "Or at least change your clothes. You wouldn't want your advisers to suspect you've been up all night dancing or anything."

She heard a chair swivel, glanced over, and saw that Elsa was looking at her; a line had formed between her brows. The sudden change of light revealed dark, heavy circles under her eyes. Her cup rattled against its china saucer, and Elsa frowned down at the damp tea leaves.

"…What?"

Something wavered in Elsa's expression.

They had been like this for a year now, caught in a series of continual flights and drops, strangers-friends-sisters-strangers again, grasping at each other through ten years and one closed door.

"Just…" Elsa sighed. "Be sure to come back, alright?"

"I will." Anna walked forward to give her sister's hands one more squeeze, and then let them drop. "Stop worrying."

"I'm your sister. That's my job."

"You have enough jobs already, Elsa." She stepped back from the desk again, prepared to make a formal bow before leaving. "And I'll be fine. Really."

They paused, and in that space of silence Elsa moved first; she reached across the space between them, knocking over books and candles as she did, and hugged Anna to her in a tight, freezing grip.

(And in uneven, tiny pieces, Anna remembered watching her say goodbye to their parents four years before: bowing, head down, keeping her distance just the way she was supposed to.)

"Come back," Elsa repeated.

The air was so cold that Anna could see her breath.

"Okay." She brought a hand up to her sister's hair. "Okay. I promise."

* * *

One of the men beside King Magnus stood. He had a thick waist, thinning hair, and eyes the color of fresh figs, which meant he was likely one of the older brothers. Prince Niels, maybe. Or High Court Judge Niels, if he was presiding over the whole thing.

"Princess Anna of Arendelle, please step forward to present yourself."

Anna walked between the rows of wooden seats. The silence and stares built around her like the press of deep water. She heard her heels clip across the courtroom floor, ten calibrated _tap-tap-taps_ until she stood in front of King Magnus, in front of Hans, and did not look down at him.

Not even once.

She drew Elsa's papers from her sleeve and smoothed her thumbs over the thick vellum. It wouldn't stop shaking, so Anna fixed her attention on the first decisive mark of her sister's handwriting; she followed its arches and bends, one letter moving smoothly into the next, and it drew her along.

Her voice came out as though through a narrow glass bottleneck.

"King Magnus, I present myself, Princess Anna of Arendelle, as an ap-ap…appellant in your court. I hereby…" the words split abruptly from their meaning, lightning in her vision, so she tried again. "…I hereby accuse this man, Prince Hans, of a crime against my sovereign ruler and sister, Queen Elsa. I charge that in this summer past, Prince Hans attempted to murder both myself and my sister, by which he sought to claim the throne of Arendelle."

She stopped.

"…Is that all, Princess Anna?"

"No. Sorry, hold on." Anna rifled through the other papers. They'd gotten shuffled around. "…Accordingly, we demand that he now confess his crimes, submitting to the judgment of your court and the penalty of…the penalty it deems suitable, according to the law in such matters."

King Magnus nodded. The man sitting three chairs to his left, who had bright black eyes and lean, ropey shoulders, seemed to be hiding a smile behind one hand. He didn't look much older than Hans.

"Prince Hans Westergard of the Southern Isles," Judge Niels said, "step forward to present yourself."

The dark-eyed young man smiled wider. Chains rattled, and behind her Anna heard Hans get to his feet. She glanced over one shoulder as he bent both knees in a patronizing bow.

"My king, I present myself, Prince Hans, as defendant in your court. I hereby deny all the aforesaid charges." He flicked his eyes up to meet Anna's. "I further maintain, saving the honor of your majesty, that I pledge to defend myself from these charges."

Anna searched his face for something to match the ugliness in his voice, something she'd often done in memory over the past year: because there must've been some sneer hidden at the curve of his mouth, a certain hardness in his grip when she wasn't paying attention. There must have been some detail she'd missed the first time, Anna told herself. Something.

And that other man, that first man, the one buried somewhere deep inside of this one – the one who had laughed through a krumkake stuffed in his face, skidded across a polished floor in his socks, hooked his pinkie finger together with hers – where had he come from?

_("Oh, Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.")_

"Princess Anna, are you prepared to give your testimony?"

Judge Niels was staring at her. King Magnus was staring at her. The dark-eyed man was staring at her. From across the courtroom came the _snap-snap-snap_ of a lady's fan.

Snow, she thought. Ice. Shattering steel.

Then she remembered the feeling of Elsa's arms around her and answered, "Yes."

"Please bring your witnesses forward." Judge Niels waved for a scribe to bring his own stack of papers. "Do you have any witnesses to speak on your behalf, Prince Hans?"

Hans smiled. "I don't see the need, Magnus. I've done nothing wrong."

* * *

Count Phillip of Charolais was a stork of a man with a slick of dark hair and a large, hooked nose: the French dignitary, Anna remembered, the one Kai had spoken to. He straightened up from a seat across the room when they called his name, adjusted the lapels of his coat, and crossed the floor to plant himself before King Magnus. The Duke of Weselton – Duke Nikolas Petrovich of Weselton, apparently – looked like a sparrow in comparison, as he bobbed his way down to stand beside them and swear his oaths.

King Magnus raised his voice.

"It is ordered that the appellant and defendant present their facts and reasons for the court." He wore an array of medals across his chest, as her father had done, and one of them caught the light when he drew breath. "This court and its council will consider their testimonies and weigh them in accordance with reason, so as to resolve the case. Princess Anna, please begin."

Her skin seemed to contract in surprise. "Me? Oh, I – where do you need me to start?"

"At the beginning, if possible," said the dark-eyed man to King Magnus's left, in a drawling voice.

"Well, you should know my name by now."

That got a round of laughter from the courtroom. Even Queen Savitri, who had kept her expression even and neutral through the whole proceeding, regarded Anna with an arch look. A gavel rapped.

"Prince Kay, try to refrain from speaking out of turn. I'm sure everyone will be happy to applaud your keen tongue later." Judge Niels had little trouble shouting the noise back down, and Anna concluded that the voice was a family trait. "Princess, please describe the circumstances of your relationship with Prince Hans."

"There's no relationship to describe. I think he's an unctuous, malcontented, duplicitous, murdering so...stinker."

More laughter. Prince Kay made no attempt to conceal his amusement this time, while Queen Savitri became interested in a loose thread of her sleeve and King Magnus's forehead puckered. Judge Niels tugged at his cravat.

"Princess Anna, please describe the circumstances surrounding your initial relationship with Prince Hans."

Anna pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from her other sleeve and twisted it between her fingers. "I met him on the day of my sister Elsa's coronation. We, um – he asked me to marry him that night."

"Prince Hans, can you offer any comment?"

"It's just like Princess Anna said, Niels. Except she really shouldn't sound so cynical." Hans rocked back and forth on his heels. "She did accept my proposal, after all."

"Did you say yes, Princess Anna?"

She tried not to hear the bite in his voice, or the quieter laughter behind hands and sleeves and raised fans. "I did, yeah. But my sister didn't."

"Naturally," Hans added.

Judge Niels ignored him. "What happened after your sister refused to approve the marriage, Princess?"

"We argued, and she got upset, and then she went to the door and…" she'd practiced this part, on keeping her tone level, "she, uh, threw ice across the ballroom."

Judge Niels sorted through his papers until he found several bound together with black string and written in blue ink. It looked like the testimony Elsa had sent ahead a week earlier. "She threw ice, you say."

"Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. See, she wore these gloves all the time when we were growing up, and I thought it was a germ thing, but it turns out I wasn't kissed by a troll after all and – "

Judge Niels lifted his hand. "That won't be necessary. Can either of your witnesses confirm this confrontation?"

"Yes, your honor," Count Phillip said. "The queen, she became upset and ran, after that. She fled into the mountains. The princess tried to go after her.

The Duke scratched at his mustache. "I'd always known there was something highly suspect about Arendelle's operations. Everyone did, of course. Nobody had made mention of the girl for years, and we certainly all found out why that evening. She nearly impaled me with that ice. I could've cracked my skull open."

Anna thought she saw Hans roll his eyes.

"Thank you, sirs. We can do without any further elaborations. I have written documentation from Queen Elsa as well…And Princess Anna, you went after your sister?"

Anna couldn't twist the handkerchief around any tighter, so she shook it out and used it to wipe her hands. "I tried."

"And who commanded Arendelle in your absence?"

"I left Prince Hans in charge."

"Prince Hans, did the Princess leave you in charge of Arendelle while pursuing her sister?"

Hans rolled one shoulder. It gave a damp, dull snap as the joint cracked. "She did. And in front of about half the town and court, I should add. Ask those two puppets over there if you want."

"Gentlemen." Judge Niels gestured toward them, although he kept his glare focused on Hans. "Did Princess Anna leave the defendant in command of her kingdom, its people, and its assets?"

"Yes, your honor."

"Yes, and the first thing he did was fling open the castle doors for all conceivable walks of life and fritter away every wool blanket to be had in the place. Trying to put on a heroic façade, no doubt, but my men and I saw right through – "

"Count Phillip," Judge Niels almost shouted, a band of sweat starting to appear on his collar, "did you have any reason to suspect Prince Hans of ill intentions while he was in command?"

"No, your honor."

"And Princess Anna, I'm surprised there were no councilors willing to act as regents for a brief time. Had Prince Hans asked to assume the role before you left? Did he solicit or force you towards that action in any way?"

"No. I just…" Anna felt her voice shrink beneath the hugeness of the judge's voice and the stares and the weight of gilded ceilings overhead. "…gave them to him."

Hans laughed, a hoarse and sawing noise. "Really, now, Niels. If I didn't know better, I would think you had already made up your mind about me. What do you think would've made a stronger impression? Setting fire to the armory? Flooding the lower halls? I had nothing but the welfare of Arendelle and its people in mind. Which was fortunate, because nobody else seemed to."

"Prince Hans," King Magnus said, "you would do well to mind your place."

"And what place would that be, exactly?" A flush of color crept up his throat. "That's all Father ever told me, too, and he was so worried about keeping me there that he never bothered to think about whether or not I deserved it. Except Father was too old and foolish to understand that, so – "

Judge Niels nodded to someone behind them.

"Henrik, my brother is misbehaving. Please deal with him."

A tall guard came forward, drew his sword, and smashed its hilt into Hans's face.

The sound was so sharp and familiar that Anna dropped the handkerchief, and watched it flutter to rest beside her feet. Hans stumbled. A single drip of blood ran down from his nose, over his lips, but he brought a gloved hand up to wipe it away before it could fall.

The dark-eyed man – Prince Kay, the judge had called him – shifted in his seat, leaning forward to rest both elbows on his knees and lace his hands together. Anna noticed that the top joint of his left index finger was missing.

"Now, where was I?" Judge Niels asked, straightening his cravat again. "Yes, right. What happened when you went after your sister, Princess Anna?"

For a moment the red splotches on Hans's white gloves distracted her, crowding her mind with the memory of blood spat out onto white tile, but then she cleared her throat to answer him.

"I, uh…I found her, and we argued. I wanted her to come back down to Arendelle, but she said she didn't – that she couldn't. She struck me with her powers." Anna's hand laid itself over her chest. A pulse beat under her palm, a little trapped bird. "She'd done it once before, but she…she accidentally froze my heart this time. The rules are kind of weird, but someone told me I'd turn to ice unless an act of true love could undo it."

"And who was it that told you this?"

"A mountain troll, sir."

Laughter, laughter, laughter.

(Except Hans stayed quiet, though that brightness in his eyes was probably a trick of the light.)

"A mountain – hold on a moment, please." Judge Niels flipped through Elsa's testimony and lifted up what looked like a torn page for everyone to see. It was from one of Papa's old books. "We are accepting, for the purposes of this hearing, that the region of Arendelle is populated by a colony of rock-dwelling trolls, as first recorded by Braggi Boddason in the 9th century."

"They're not really rock-dwelling trolls, sir. They're, um, kind of just made out of rocks."

Judge Niels turned an odd shade of purple for a moment, so King Magnus spoke instead. "You said she put ice into your heart? What do you mean by that?"

"Yes, Princess, what do you mean by that?" Hans mimicked. "This does all sound far-fetched, and that's quite something from a girl who agreed to marry someone she'd just met."

The guard simply cracked him across the face this time, using the back of his hand the way Anna had heard masters were expected to strike their slaves. The red welt rose like a blush on his cheek, bright and articulate against pale, freckled skin.

The pulse throbbed against her temples, so loud it was like holding a shell up to her ears.

"I know - I know it sounds crazy." Anna kept her hand where it was, pressing her fingers into the notch of her collarbone. "It'd be – huh. It'd probably be easier if I showed you. If that's okay."

"Showed me?" King Magnus repeated. "Niels, do you know what she's referring to?"

Judge Niels examined the papers again. "There's no mention of evidence in the Queen's testimony, anyway."

"Yeah, she…she doesn't know. I never told her." Anna forced her hands up to the neck of her bodice. "Could I come closer, please?"

"Please do, Princess."

Anna walked to the dais, undoing tiny pearl buttons – one, two, three, _tap-tap-tap_ – as she went.

Queen Savitri came to stand beside her husband as Judge Niels stepped forward as well, in time to see Anna pull back the fabric of her dress and camisole and chemise. Written into the skin over her heart was a pearly, raised scar, about the size of a palm, formed into the delicate fractal pattern of a snowflake.

"Ah," King Magnus said. "Well, then."

"I'll have to ask that you show this to the courtroom, Princess. Please accept my apologies in advance." Judge Niels took her by the shoulders. "Princess Anna has presented this to us as physical evidence of her claims."

He turned her toward the benches and waiting spectators and Hans, whose expression changed for a splintered second to show something else: some other face, maybe, like the briefest opening and slamming of a door.

Masks, she thought. Nothing but a bunch of masks, without seams or panels or laces to hold them in place.

_("Oh, Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.") _

Those sitting in benches against the far walls certainly couldn't have seen the scar themselves, but a description must've traveled around the room quickly enough. As soon as Judge Niels released her, Anna closed the buttons up again: with steady hands, she was pleased to note. Good. Right.

"Does the Prince have anything to add?" King Magnus asked.

Hans was still looking at kept both hands shielded over her heart a few moments longer, just to be sure.

"No."

Judge Niels cleared his throat to continue.

"And what happened after the Queen froze Princess Anna's heart, as she's put it?"

"I saw her when she returned from the mountains, your majesty." Count Phillip stepped toward Anna half a pace, and seemed to consider putting his arm around her before thinking better of it. Anna tried to straighten herself up. "The servants said she was very cold, as if she was turning to ice on the inside."

"At what time did she return?"

The Duke polished his spectacles against a coattail. His eyes looked pale and defenseless without them, but he squinted at Anna once they were set back on his nose.

"Two days after she left, your majesty. Prince Hans had organized a search party and gone into the mountains to find her. I sent two of my men with him. They'd managed to capture Queen Elsa and place her in one of the dungeons, until it could be decided what to do with her, but they'd found no trace of the princess. Prince Hans was preparing to organize another search when she came back."

Anna clenched her shoulders. She'd never known that.

Prince Kay, still perched forward on his knees, gave one an exaggerated slap. "Ha! Still keeping the marriage prospects open, were you, Lucky Thirteen?"

"I told you, I had nothing but Arendelle's interests in mind." Then it was Hans's turn to divert his gaze, to turn it somewhere above his brother Magnus's crown. "It kept getting colder. The harbor was frozen over. I merely wanted to speak with Queen Elsa and ask her to end the curse. No other solutions were offered."

"But you were at the castle when Princess Anna returned from the mountains?"

"Yes."

"And Princess Anna? Could you continue for us?"

"My guide took me back to Arendelle. We thought Hans – that Prince Hans might be able to help me. Two of our servants brought me to see him in my father's library, and all of the dignitaries left to, um…to…"

"...To give them a bit of, eh, privacy, your majesty," Count Phillip finished. "Forgive me. The princess was very afraid."

Judge Niels seemed to have recovered some of his composure.

"And what sort of help did you expect the defendant to be capable of giving you, Princess Anna?"

Then it was Anna's turn to redden, truly redden all the way down her neck, and suddenly the room with its faces and colors and tile compass pointed north all swum together in her vision. She felt a stinging nettle of heat form inside her nose and mouth.

"I –"

"Oh, come on. Use your imagination, Niels. Haven't you read the stories?" asked Hans, who seemed suddenly closer beside her. "She thought a true love's kiss could save her, of course."

Anna allowed herself another glance.

Hans stood with his legs apart like a soldier, holding his left wrist in his right, white-gloved hand, the one stained red with drying blood. He had his own eyes fixed on Judge Niels, his profile turned towards her with its clean-shaved, stinging cheek.

"The Princess can speak for herself, Prince Hans. I am sure she neither needs nor desires your own recollection of the events, which I wish to God we could all be spared."

Laughter again, although at least not at her expense this time.

"And what happened then, Princess Anna? Did the defendant, ah, attempt to save you? "

She gave some thought to looking away from Hans, again, but kept her eyes on him instead.

_("Oh, Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.")_

"No," she answered. "He didn't."

One, two, three, four more beats, and Hans surprised her by turning his face aside first. A lock of hair fell over his forehead.

"What did he say to you, Princess? Do you remember?"

Ha. Anna could quote him from memory. She had avoided that library for three months afterward.

"He said that as thirteenth in line for his own kingdom, he knew he'd have to marry into a throne if he wanted to be king. He said my sister would've been a better choice, since she's the heir, but I was –" and she almost stumbled here, but not quite "—easier. He said he would've married me and staged an accident for Elsa later, but then everything else happened and I was already dying, so all he had to do was let me."

"And then?"

"Then he left the room and locked me in."

It was quiet, without even the laughter or the _snap-snap-snap_ of a fan. Hans kept his face turned, and Anna saw for the first time that his neck had bruises on it. They looked like fingerprints.

"And where would that have left him?" Judge Niels went on. "Not with any legitimate claim to the throne, certainly."

"It is Arendelle's law, your majesty," Count Phillip said. "That was a matter of our own inquiry during Princess Anna's absence."

The Duke adjusted his spectacles again. "Indeed. I believe the previous King of Arendelle claimed only one living relative beyond his heirs. A poor piece of planning, but there you have it."

"It's my aunt. She's the reigning Queen of Corona, until my cousin comes of age," Anna finished. "My appointment of Prince Hans would've been binding if both of us had died."

"If Queen Elsa had died?"

"Yes, we were waiting in one of the drawing rooms when Prince Hans came to see us after that. He was in a perfectly distraught state...Gasping, weeping, falling all over himself, telling us that Princess Anna was dead. And in the next breath he declared Queen Elsa guilty of treason against her own blood and sentenced her to death." The Duke straightened his back. His elevated heels clicked together. "I was all for confirming that, of course, but nobody else thought to take the time."

Count Phillip exchanged a look with the Duke.

"It was not a matter of time, your honor. We could not go to see. The halls of the castle, they were filling with ice. Like spikes. The city was freezing. But when Prince Hans went for the Queen, she was gone."

"Gone?"

"Escaped. Out into the storm."

"And Princess Anna, I presume that you did not, in fact, freeze to death? How did you escape from the room where the defendant left you?"

"Ol…" Anna swallowed. A man who balked before the idea of trolls and frozen hearts would likely not welcome the idea of an animate snowman into his courtroom. "I left myself out the window and climbed down the roof."

"Into a snow storm? I thought you were freezing to death. That would seem counter-intuitive."

"I wanted to find…I wanted to find help." In the middle of a room warmed by sunlight, in a dress of heavy brocade on a summer day, Anna shivered. "But I saw Prince Hans first."

"What was he doing?"

"He was walking toward my sister. He'd found her, and his sword was drawn."

She stopped. She waited for the man beside her to speak.

He did.

"…Princess Anna," Hans said, stringing the words together like beads, "was dying. All of Arendelle was freezing. Killing the Queen was the only way to save them both, because I wasn't willing to put my faith in stories. Can I really be blamed for that?"

"And what Princess Anna has said, about leaving her? And the order of Queen Elsa's execution, how's your memory on that?"

"Princess Anna is…misremembering, I'm sure." And maybe it was the pulse in Anna's ears that caused her to hear the fumble. "I locked her in there to keep her safe. I knew nothing else would convince the dignitaries to go along with what I knew was necessary."

Liar. Anna felt her fingernails dig into the skin of her palms.

_Liar. Liar. Liar._

King Magnus asked the next question before Judge Niels could. "So he draws his sword upon Queen Elsa, then. And what did you do, Princess?"

Anna closed her eyes.

She reached deeper and found once more the memory of Elsa's arms around her, Elsa's hands in her own, Elsa smiling, Elsa fallen to her knees in a gown made of ice.

She opened her eyes again.

"He raised his sword and I – I stepped under it."

"You did what, Princess?"

"I stepped under it, your majesty."

"I'm afraid I don't understand." Magnus shifted himself towards the witnesses. "What does she mean by that?"

"She stepped into the way of his sword, your majesty," Count Phillip said. His hands performed a few aimless, searching gestures. "I have never seen anything like it."

"But what happened? How did she survive?"

"Her body, it – _pardonnez-moi_, your majesty, I do not know what else to say. It turned to ice."

"Excuse me?"

"It turned to ice," Count Phillip repeated. "She froze in one instant, like a crystal. The prince shattered his sword against her."

Judge Niels wiped his face. "Magnus, this is all very –"

Bowing his head even lower in apology, Count Phillip interrupted the judge before he could finish. "Please, permit me to present something. I thought it wise to keep."

He waved another scribe forward, who came carrying a satchel bound in twine. He had it unrolled across the floor, and the broken, slivered pieces of a sword flashed in the light. Both Judge Niels and King Magnus stared down at the shards. Some were as thin as needles, made brittle by a pattern of frost that spread over the steel like a spiderweb.

"...I asked for the pieces to be saved, your majesty. It was a hard thing to believe, for myself."

"I'm not sure about your own benchmark for such things," the Duke broke in, "but I found what happened next to be more extraordinary."

"What was that, precisely? Please elaborate."

"Why, the ice broke, of course. The princess turned to ice before our very eyes, and no sooner had the queen stood up to – to embrace her, I suppose, then the ice thawed around her and she was alive again."

Judge Niels bent very slowly to picked up the sword hilt, which had about a hand-span of blade still attached to it. Even then, it looked clean and sharp as he swung several passes with it.

"Do you recognize this blade, Prince Hans?"

"Yes." His mouth twitched into the suggestion of a smile. "It was given to me after my graduation from the Royal Naval Academy."

Judge Niels turned the broken blade towards Anna. He sighted an eye along its blood groove. "Did you step in the way of this sword, Princess?"

"Yes."

"Did you know that – what Count Phillip has described, about watching you turn to ice. Did you know that was going to happen?"

"No."

"Then you expected –"

"Yes."

"And why did you do it?"

"I'm...I'm sorry, your honor. I don't have an answer." Anna stared down at her hands before picking her head up again. "I didn't think about asking why, I guess."

"And the ice broke, after that, as your witnesses report?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Hans laughed then, and it was such a quiet and easy sound that Anna felt another shiver go up through her.

"How exactly did they elect you to be High Court Judge, Niels? Did you win a drinking contest? Try to pay attention," he said. "That was her act of true love."

The silence clapped back down over them again.

It must have been only for a second, several seconds, but it seemed wide enough to fall through. Anna turned her gaze to Judge Niels, to King Magnus, to Queen Savitri, to Count Phillip and the Duke of Weselton, and could not recognize what she saw there: and then Anna looked at Hans, and looked away again as quickly as possible, because she was afraid that she could.

_("That's what brothers do.")_

"Princess Anna."

"Yes."

"Is there anything more that you would like to say?"

"No."

"And Prince Hans?"

"No," Hans answered, with almost impossible civility. "That's everything."

* * *

King Magnus and the others disappeared into a room behind the inner sanctum. Across the city, faintly, Anna could hear a clock strike ten, and she walked out into the center hall. Anders let her pass without comment.

She sank down onto a stone bench beneath one of the royal portraits. A sigh sagged out of her, and she breathed in the scents of beeswax and paper to sigh again.

And in the double-darkness behind her closed eyes, she imagined the bruises on Hans's neck again. She imagined the red dripping from his nose onto white gloves. She imagined the dark-eyed man, leaning forward to watch.

_("That's what brothers do.")_

But they _were_ his brothers, she told herself. And he was a prince.

They were his brothers, and he was a prince, and everything would be fine. They would sentence him to life in prison, or to hard labor in one of the colonies, and something within her would unravel like a spool between them, join them across that distance, but everything would be fine. Eventually.

Right.

_("Oh, Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.")_

And if they chose something else, Anna told herself, that would be fine too.

That would be quick. That would be simple: like bringing a pair of scissors up, holding a thread tight, and _snip-snap-snare, _everything would be fine. They would bring him through the city square on a tumbrel, slip the black hood over his face, walk him to the scaffold – or perhaps his legs would give out before then, and they'd have to carry him up the steps like a child – lay his neck down on the block, and then there would be the headsman's axe raised with its edge as clean and new as the point of a nine-penny nail, and –

Anna clenched her fists.

No, they were his brothers. And he was a prince. They were his brothers, and he was a prince, and everything would be fine, fine, fine.

"Princess Anna? Are you alright?"

Anna blinked. The light stung, but her vision focused to find Queen Savitri standing in front of her. She felt herself moving to stand up and bow, but the queen put a hand on her shoulder.

"I am sorry. I did not mean to frighten you." She held out a piece of caraway bread, wrapped in a shell of wax paper. "I thought perhaps you would like something to eat."

"Oh. Um...Thank you, but I'm not very hungry right now."

Queen Savitri sat down beside her in a rustling froth of wide skirts, setting the bread down between them. "Was your journey very long?"

Anna tried to shape the words into sentences, and was glad that she could. "No, it's only three days between here and Arendelle. Anders said we had a good west wind behind us, so that helped, but I really wouldn't know the difference anyway because I've never been sailing before. He could tell me it was ocean fairies, and I'd probably have to believe him."

"You learn, if you are on a ship for longer. The journey from Sempore is many, many months. In the end I was so tired with having nothing to do that I would climb the...I do not remember the name." She pantomimed the motion of climbing something with her hands and feet. "Up the ropes. Like a look-out. The crew was so tired of having nothing to do that they let me."

Anna studied her profile, with its long, straight nose and dark lashes. She really was young. "Seriously? In a dress and everything?"

"My husband sent many trunks of dresses for my gift, but I found books and men's trousers as well. The books were most useful. Your language is very, ah, how do you say it? _Anōkhā__. _Strange."

"An – oh – kah? Did I get that right?"

"Yes. A little faster, maybe." She beat three syllables against her palm in quick succession. "Like this."

Anna repeated it twice before the Queen was satisfied. "Very good, Princess. You are a better learner than I."

"Me? Pfft. No way. You should see my sister chatting it up with the dignitaries who come to visit her. It's like, French, and German, and Portuguese, and Romanian, and then she can read Latin for the bishop, too, and if I had that many voices in my head at once I'd just start gibbering nonsense like a monkey or something. Speaking one language is hard enough."

"Can your sister truly do all of what they say she can?"

"You mean about the ice?"

Queen Savitri's gaze dropped to Anna's heart for a moment. "Ah, yes. I do not mean to bother you."

"Nah, it's fine. Like I said, I know it's…well, it's an adjustment. To think about, that is. Every time I start to feel like I can accept this version of normal, she'll do something like make it snow in the throne room or freeze the fountains over, and it'll be like finding out all over again."

"You truly did not know, then? When you were children?"

Anna stretched both legs out in front of her and tapped her toes together. Queen Savitri sat with her feet crossed at the ankles. "Well, Papa knew. He was the one who came up with the whole gloves idea."

"He wanted her to hide it? To keep it a…I am sorry, what is the word for this? A hidden thing. Something she could not tell to others."

"A secret?"

"Yes. A secret."

Anna fidgeted. "He thought she could learn to control her powers that way. I don't know if it helped her too much, but he – I guess he just wanted her to be safe. He did what he could."

"Your father was a very good man, yes?"

"Yeah, he was."

Queen Savitri nodded, and fell silent, and in the quiet lapse Anna thought. She remembered huge ships splintering in fjord, arms of ice coming up from the moat to crush the castle inward on itself. A good man, yes: because after all, a king with a daughter who could do the things that Elsa could might have made a very different choice.

The queen didn't say anything else after that, but drew a piece of embroidery from a small bag that hung at her waist. Anna watched her work the needle through, stitching little pink tea roses into a handkerchief's corner, which was when she remembered that she'd left her own handkerchief lying on the floor of the inner sanctum.

She would have to get it later, when she went back in to hear the sentencing.

And she felt another drop in her chest, there, but Anna steadied herself.

Everything would be fine.

She studied the scribes and lawyers walking by and tried to guess where they were going, what they were doing. Maybe that one picked his nose in court and ate it when the other parliament members weren't looking. Maybe that one wanted to ban chocolate fondue because he'd burned his tongue at a party. Maybe that one had to defend some rats for the crime of doing what they were supposed to, for doing what was in their nature.

Anna stared up at the stained glass windows and watched colored patterns on the floor shift as the sun moved. The clock struck eleven, and then twelve. Eventually, she ate the bread.

_("Oh, Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.")_

They were his brothers, she repeated to herself. They were his brothers, and he was a prince, and everything would be fine. Either way, everything would be fine.

She said it to herself so many times that when they called the court back into session, just after the clock struck one, she was ready.

* * *

Nobody had to make Hans kneel, this time, not even with the slightest shove; he lowered himself down to the floor, in a clatter of knees and chains, and stayed that way even as Judge Niels spoke.

"This high and holy court has weighed the testimonies of the appellant and defendant." He turned back towards his brother. "King Magnus will now read the sentencing."

King Magnus stood again.

The crown never shifted or moved on his head, a feat Anna had always wondered about. He came down from the dais, four resounding thuds of his boots. He took four more paces to stand over Hans, close enough for Anna to notice that although Magnus was taller, and fairer-haired, and several decades older, their noses were exactly the same shape.

"A year ago, Hans," King Magnus began, "you asked that I grant you permission to represent our kingdom at Queen Elsa's coronation. Did I allow it?"

They waited so long that Anna saw King Magnus look toward the guard, saw the one named Henrik move to draw his sword again, but over the throbbing in her ears she heard Hans's reply.

"Yes."

"And instead of doing our family and our country an honor, which would have been the simplest thing in the world, you returned in the brig of a ship with irons on your wrists. You attempted to commit an unspeakable crime against one of our oldest allies, and you failed. Do you understand that, Hans?"

"Yes."

"Our father never entertained any great notions about your prospects, but I believe even he would be ashamed to find that his son would bring himself so low and still fail." A tremor ran through King Magnus's jaw, like he was grinding his teeth. A vein stood out on his forehead. "To speak honestly, I would enjoy nothing more than to have you dragged through the streets and beaten like a slave – as a reminder of your place, we could say."

_("That's what brothers do.") _

Anna felt herself wince.

Hans did not move.

"Unfortunately you are a member of the royal family by blood, regardless of my personal feelings on your right to be so named, and thus I must punish you as one." Then Magnus knelt. He grabbed his brother's chin in one bare hand. He turned it up to face his, and Anna felt another flash of cold memory snap its way up her spine. "Does that seem fair to you, Prince Hans?"

A third time, in a quieter and harder voice than before, he said, "Yes."

Judge Niels handed King Magnus a small slip of paper. King Magnus broke the seal with one blunt, split fingernail. Anna held her breath like a doubled fist inside her chest, closed her eyes one more time, and through the darkness she heard him:

"In the case pending before the King our Lord, the court has considered this matter and reached a decision – namely, it finds Prince Hans guilty of the charges brought against him, and sentences him to die at this time tomorrow as payment for his crimes."

But Anna was ready, yes.

She was ready. She hardly moved at all, because she knew that eyes would be on her, so she opened her own and kept them fixed forward, kept her hand around the wooden railing, and she was ready, she was ready.

It was fine. Everything would be fine.

There would be the tumbrel, and the black hood, and the scaffold, and the ax swinging down clean and sharp and bright, and she knew what was going to happen now and so everything would be fine.

She was ready.

What Anna wasn't ready for, however, was the look of open, helpless surprise she saw on Hans's face.

And she might have been back on the night of Elsa's coronation, then. She might have just watched her older sister go to the door, whip around in a sudden break of anger, throw out her hand, and send a thousand spikes of ice shooting up from the floor. She might have just glanced back at the man who had asked her to marry him, to see if he was as shocked as she was.

Anna waited.

Nobody said anything. Nobody spoke, or moved, or wept in big gulping sobs, not even the woman with the fan and the copper-colored curls. Count Phillip and the Duke of Weselton spoke to their own men, waving off questions and fixing their coats. King Magnus returned to his canopied throne.

By slow, irregular increments, the crowds all stood or broke into conversation. They stretched their backs. They closed up their fans, checked their pocket watches, and tapped dust from their boots. Someone made a joke, and someone else laughed.

Hans did not move from his place in the middle of the floor, at the center of that great fixed compass.

And his hands were shaking, Anna saw: under the white gloves, beneath the iron manacles, they were shaking.

_("Oh, Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.")_

Anna held the words in her mind, along with the memory of snow and ice and shattering steel.

He had tried to kill her sister, she thought.

He had left her to die, to freeze, had dampened the fire before he left and shut the door in her face. He had lied to her. He had broken his promise to her. He had taken something from her, some indefinable piece of her, which she would never get back.

Right.

But the black hood, the scaffold, that ax, that blood.

And that man with the krumkake stuffed in his face, even: that man sliding in his socks, that man holding her waist to dance and holding her shoulder in comfort and holding her arms as she stumbled and holding her face in one hand, that man who had probably never even existed in the first place–

_("Oh, Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.")_

Right. Right. Right.

Anna gathered her skirts inward to stand.

"Wait," she called. "Please, your majesty."

She strained her voice higher to push against the voices of the crowd, and King Magnus turned towards her. The hush settled back down as everyone stopped.

"Yes, Princess Anna?"

Her feet were moving forward, _tap-tap-tap_ again down the wooden steps and over the stone floor. Her heart was beating and her insides were aching and her lips kept speaking and she really had no control over any of it.

"Wait, I'd like to –I'd like to ask that you reconsider." One, two, three breaths, in and out, _conceal, don't feel_. "Is there an appeal that can be made? In Arendelle we have a law that allows our ruler to overturn a decision by his council if, um, if…There must be something I can do."

"What do you mean, Princess?" King Magnus frowned. Queen Savitri sat very still beside him. "We have pronounced a sentence according to your testimony, and having my judgment questioned in this courtroom is not an offense I will take lightly."

"I'm sorry, your majesty." Anna bowed, maybe lower than she needed to. "I just –"

"I believe there are several laws still intact regarding trial by combat, Princess, but that would require him to prove his innocence with a sword against a champion of my own choosing. Or for you to act as champion for him...Forgive me any precipitate conclusions, but I do not believe that's the sort of resolution you're hoping for."

"Well, I –" she tried to laugh. "I have on good authority that I swing a mean right hook, your majesty."

"Careful, Magnus. She really does," said a hoarse voice beside her.

About five paces of distance separated them. And if she hadn't liked Hans's face before, she certainly didn't like it now: now she was back in a rowboat, watching a strange man lose his balance and tip forward into her arms, reaching out to grab her as he did.

King Magnus's expression stayed the same.

"Henrik, please take my brother away. He seems to be upsetting Princess Anna."

The guard approached Hans, who got to his feet on joints that seemed to creak. But when Henrik laid a hand on Hans's shoulder, he suddenly slipped beneath it.

"Prince Hans – "

"Now, Henrik. It'd be rude not to give Princess Anna what she came for, wouldn't it?"

Anna watched.

Five paces away and Hans was pulling off both gloves with his teeth, left and right. Anna tried to make her feet move. They refused. Three paces and Hans was lifting his arms. Anna did not think to raise her own.

At one pace he looped the manacles' chain over Anna's head, pulled it tight against the back of her neck, drew her whole body forward and up flush against his.

He held her face in his hands and she flinched at the touch of cold iron cuffs on her cheek. She heard his sighing breath, smelt his sweat and dried blood. She felt his nose as it bumped into hers and his lips as they pressed into her own, brief and hard and insistent and needful, felt herself go rigid when he did. Heat flowered in her belly, across her face, under her ribcage.

She counted out three seconds.

Hans pulled back. He opened his mouth to speak.

Anna ducked out of his reach. Her hair came loose from its pin, and the long plaits slithered down her shoulders; then she squared her stance, made a fist, and delivered a hard, swinging right upper-cut to his jaw.

He staggered back and almost fell. Henrik and the other soldiers laughed, and maybe Prince Kay laughed too.

"Thanks." Anna flexed the stiffness out of her knuckles. "How'd you know I was hoping for another chance to do that?"

"Told you so, Magnus," Hans said, bending to pick up his gloves. "And it's like you told me, Anna. 'I've never met someone who thinks so much like me,' was that it?"

Anna didn't answer him.

Her tongue felt swollen inside her mouth, and she watched as they led him away. Quickly, she smoothed her braids. The pin had rolled away somewhere.

Anders approached her quietly from the left, holding out a handkerchief that Anna recognized as her own. She took it from him and wiped her lips, her cheeks, her neck, before balling it up in one hand.

"Are you alright, milady?"

"Yeah, I'm alright. Thank you." She thought for a moment, recalling the summons. "Anders, the letter they sent me said that today's the feast day for Saint Anthony of Padua. Who's he supposed to be?"

"That's easy, milady. My wife prays to him all the time, on account of the fact that she's so forgetful." Anders tried to smile at her. "He's the patron saint of lost things."

* * *

**This is a condensed and extremely edited version of what an actual court process would have looked like in 19th century Denmark, and I apologize for sacrificing historical accuracy for the sake of story. **

**The place that Queen Savitri hails from is a veiled reference to Fredricksnagore in India, which was a Danish colony until - hey, look at that - 1845. We'll meet more wives and brothers of the Westerguard family soon...****Also, Hans is a sneak. You'll see what I mean. Things are about to get complicated. **

**Thank you for reading. Critiques, suggestions, and comments are always welcome, and I sincerely appreciate your reviews. **


	4. Chapter 4

**Thank you for waiting! I've gotten part of the next chapter written already. I hope the pacing and transitions in this work, since it fits a lot in. **

**Frozen and its characters do not belong to me. **

* * *

They'd thought to send a coach for her this time.

It glided across the city square on slim black wheels. Children ran beside it, swatting at the horses' flanks with reeds. The driver cracked his whip over their heads. Its sound split the hot afternoon air, but Anna couldn't bring herself to wince.

Anders lifted her into the passenger seat when it rolled to a halt. A gold-trimmed door sealed her up inside the contained space of quiet. She felt the coach rock on its springs as it started forward again. Bright shop windows and painted houses snapped across her vision as they moved. A bead of sweat slid down under her collar.

Anna wiped her face and neck again with the handkerchief, making a second pass over the places where his hands had touched her.

_("Oh Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.") _

She kept the handkerchief over her eyes.

Maybe Anna could tell them she was ill. She would tell them she'd contracted some rare, highly contagious, troll-borne disease that would require her to remain quarantined for the next forty-eight hours.

Or she could depart this evening, instead, saying she'd been summoned home via some preternatural sense that the sisters of ice witches all possessed, on account of a disastrous chocolate shortage that required her immediate attention. It could be a peasant uprising, a plague of locust, an invading flock of giant ducks. Any lie would do.

Or Anna could simply lock herself up in her room tomorrow, and lie in bed, and wait to hear the clock tower strike one again.

There was always that.

"You're fine," Anna said, to the empty seat across from her. "You're fine."

The Southern Isles' castle was all bright limestone, composed and self-assured in its massive proportions. The coach carried her over a drawbridge to the west barbican, through a gate passage under walls twenty feet thick, and swung to a stop in the gravel courtyard. Anna counted eight towers along the outer ward's walls: a chapel tower, a stock house tower, and one that could've been a prison tower.

Footmen hurried up to take her valises, while other hands pulled her along into the vastness of a great hall. Silence fell back into place behind them like water in the wake of a ship, but naturally Anna knew that couldn't be the case; there were servants everywhere, running about with dishes and rags and curtain hooks and brooms.

It was probably-definitely-certainly just her.

"We'll have your trappings taken to the inner ward, Princess Anna," a house steward told her. "Your apartment is in the king's tower. He would like you to dine with his family for the evening meal. That will be at six o'clock."

"Thank you."

They walked past a grand staircase. The banister was long and curving, and looked quite suitable for racing down. Her footsteps seemed to vanish within the thick carpeting.

There were more portraits in the anteroom, mostly of women. Anna noted that one had bright black eyes like Prince Kay. Another, posed with a book opened in her lap, had King Magnus's fair and curling hair. A third, dressed all in red with a white glove on one hand, hung next to the other two, and s_nap-snap-snap_ went the fan in Anna's memory_._

"…Hey, Anders?" Anna bent her head toward him. He was walking just behind her. "Can I ask you a stupid question?"

Anders seemed to turn this over for a moment. He scratched at his broad, square jaw. "You can ask me a question, milady."

"How many wives did the old king have?"

"King Frederic, you mean?"

She tried to lower her voice. "Yeah."

"Three, if I remember. Duchess Louise was first. I think Prince Kristian was her youngest boy before she got the scarlet fever. Then Queen Sophie was his second wife…a countess, before he married her? She died in childbed when Prince Kay was hardly more than a babe himself."

"And?"

"Oh. Well." Anders continued scratching at his beard. "You have to understand the things that get into men's minds, sometimes. It's not the sort of talk a princess should hear."

"Who was his third wife, Anders?"

"He married his royal mistress after that, milady. The archbishop wasn't too pleased about it." Anders moved to scratch behind his ear, next, keeping his arm as a partition between them. "Queen Helene von Vieregg. You might've seen her at the court, today. Prince Hans is her only child."

Anna thought, and then she nodded. "Okay."

Anders nodded in agreement, although to what she wasn't sure.

The house steward turned towards her. "I'll ask that you be escorted to your room, Princess. I'm sure you've had something of a tiring day. Is there anything I can have brought for you?"

Anna stopped. She faced the steward, grasped her skirts, and dropped into a curtsy so that he would not see her sway.

"I don't need anything, thank you."

* * *

About halfway through dinner – roast swan, in a plum sauce that would've been pretty good if she could bring herself to swallow – Anna noticed that a man across the table was staring at her.

He had a pale, narrow face and an upright figure like King Magnus, although somewhat more rawboned, and sparse hair like Judge Niels, although his was dark brown and parted down the middle. A silver medal dangled from his neck on a red and white ribbon. A woman sat next to him, with amber skin and wiry black hair pulled into a French twist.

The man was also missing his left eye, and wore a carved leather patch in its place; that was why Anna had to concentrate very hard on not staring back.

She tried to focus on the sounds around her, on the clink of silverware, on the candles, on the great chandeliers overhead. It was something she could tell Elsa about later, at least. Losing a staring contest to a one-eyed man. Could she make that into a pun? She could probably make that into a pun.

The woman leaned over to whisper something in the one-eyed man's ear. Then, louder, she said, "Stop scaring the girl now, Kristian. I told you, you look enough like a pirate as it is."

The man nodded and flicked his eyes – no, his eye, his _eye_ – up to Anna. He cleared his throat.

"My apologies, Princess Anna." He tapped at the eye-patch. "I'll admit it's a bit off-putting. I just wanted to give you my thanks, is all."

"Wait, what?" Anna blinked and looked up from her food. She'd been moving the potatoes around with a fork. She picked a point in the center of his forehead to stare at. "Sorry. You're…?"

"Admiral Kristian Westerguard." He extended a hand to her, reaching across a bowl of bread pudding to do so. "I'm Number Five, if that helps."

She offered him her own limp hand in return. "Oh, that – yeah, that kind of does."

"That is the first thing he tells everyone," the woman said. She had a round body and generous, strong shoulders. Her face had absolutely no angles. "Still took me three years to get all of the names straight."

Admiral Kristian poked her with his elbow. "Princess Anna, this is my wife Marguerite."

And Anna let herself stare now, because the woman responded by giving her a snapping, mock salute. Bracelets jangled on her wrist. "Bonjou, Princess. At your service."

Anna wasn't sure if she'd heard her right. It was almost French, but not quite. "Uh…Je suis enchantée de faire votre? Did I get that right?"

"Ah-ha. Very close, Princess. But it was Kreyòl." Marguerite propped the points of her elbows on the table. "Well, Kristian, go on. You should not keep the lady waiting."

"Mèsi, lanmou." He took her hand for a moment to run his thumb across her knuckles. They wore matching silver wedding bands. "It's nothing serious, really. I wanted to thank you because my brother and I – "

"Number Nine," said Marguerite, over the rim of her champagne flute.

" – My brother and I had a bet going as to how you'd, uh, conduct yourself in court today. I'll be taking home a nice purse of prize money now, and I thought I'd give credit where it's due." He craned his neck, rose from his seat to look at a man sitting three chairs to Anna's left. "Isn't that right, Captain?"

The man was in his middle thirties, with a head of close-cropped brown hair, dark eyes, and an unmistakably familiar pair of trimmed sideburns. He didn't return Admiral Kristian's grin.

"Yes."

"…You're welcome, I guess?" Anna hitched the last note up into a question. "Why? It wasn't because of what I said about the trolls, was it?"

Marguerite smiled into her drink before taking another sip. Admiral Kristian laughed.

"Siegfried here thought you'd be more the weeping, shrinking violet sort of girl. Marguerite and I said you'd most likely end things by giving Hans a fist to the jaw, and we certainly weren't disappointed. You've got one hell of an arm on you, if you'll pardon my language."

Before Anna could respond, Captain Siegfried leaned back in his chair to look her fully in the face. She mimicked his action. He wore the same flat expression, but the lines around his mouth didn't seem as harsh now.

"I met your father during the Second Jutland War, Princess. He saved one of our frigates in the Battle of Cuxhaven. I suspect he trained you in the art of fisticuffs, as well?"

"Kind of. Him and my great-uncle." Anna felt babble rising in her throat. "He used to have this story about wrestling a bear in Russia, except Mama said the bear got ten feet taller every time he told it and Uncle Gregor had been a spice merchant his whole life anyway."

"You have to allow a sailor his embellishments every now and then, I suppose. My boatswain used to tell all the junior lieutenants about a sea serpent that nearly ate him while he was traveling in the Mediterranean, whenever they had trouble staying awake for a night watch. It worked on almost everyone."

"Almost?" Anna asked. It seemed like the next thing to do.

Captain Siegfried's face didn't change. "Hans served with me during the Rendsburg War. He told poor Oskar that the taste of him had probably turned the beast off of humans for good."

"Yes, I remember you telling me this story," Admiral Kristian said. He ran an index finger around the edge of his plate. "I can see why your midshipman was willing to risk making the claim that he dropped an anchor on his commanding officer's foot by pure accident."

Siegfried looked across the table at his brother. "It was an accident, as far as I could tell. Hans may have disliked taking orders, but I never heard talk of him being cruel or haphazard in giving them. Most of the men who sailed with us found him fair to tolerable."

Admiral Kristian sopped up some plum sauce with a piece of blackbread. He carved into his meat with a knife. "I find bilge rats tolerable, Siegfried. That doesn't mean I want them sharing a table with me."

"I never claimed to either. It's just something I've been puzzling over." Siegfried swirled his glass of wine. Both of them had forgotten about her. "How does the saying go, again? The one about drowning men?"

"'There's no point in learning how to swim once the water is up to your lips,' is that it?"

"That's the one. Maybe."

Kristian took another bite of the tender meat, exposing a white bone beneath. Siegfried drained his wine and poured more when a servant passed by with the bottle.

Anna shifted her gaze back and forth between their faces, and then looked up the long, crowded feast table to where King Magnus sat beside Queen Savitri.

If Siegfried was older than thirty, then Kristian was nearer to forty-five. King Magnus with his silvering beard, and Judge Niels with his thinning hair, must have both been in their fifties. Anna traced numbers out on the tablecloth. They would have all been young men, grown men, when Hans was born.

Maybe they'd been asked to come home for his christening, she considered. And maybe they hadn't. Maybe they had brought him gifts, and maybe they hadn't. Maybe they had gone off and left him afterwards, relegated him to the quiet corners of this castle with its huge, empty, waiting silence. Maybe, a long time ago, some of them had pretended he was invisible.

_("That's what brothers do.") _

And tomorrow afternoon, at about one o'clock under the hot, staring sun, Hans's brothers – half-brothers, really – would all stand together before the scaffold. They would watch Hans be led – or carried – up its steps with a black hood over his face. They would all watch – or not – the executioner raise an ax and bring it down.

But that's what he would have done to Elsa, Anna told herself.

She looked at her distorted reflection in the glasses, pots, and candlesticks around her, her image scattered in a dozen different places. Hans had raised his sword, sharper than the ax would be. He had brought it down. And there would have been blood on the snow, blood on the ice, blood on the steel, blood on the mantle of Elsa's dress.

But none of that had happened, because Anna had been there instead.

_("…And sisters.") _

Something hot and solid surged up within her.

"I'm very sorry, Captain," Anna said, suddenly. She got to her feet. "Admiral, I'm sorry."

They both seemed surprised. Marguerite fixed her in a curious, beaded stare, the creases around her eyes sharpening just a bit.

"For what, Princess Anna?" Admiral Kristian asked.

She paused. For what, he was asking her. For what, for what. The whole room seemed to swing upwards around her. "About – about the bet, I meant. Captain Siegfried lost his money. I didn't, um, mean to cause a disagreement."

"I'm sure I'll be fine, Princess," Captain Siegfried said. "A few krone lost on a foolish bet is nothing. And besides, he's my brother. We've done worse to each other."

"I thought so." Anna pushed back her chair. "Excuse me for a moment, please."

She gathered up her skirts and rushed between the servants, out the door of the dining room into a passage that lead towards the castle's chapel. It was empty. Lit sconces along the walls cast long, fluttering shadows

Her foot snagged on a rug. She was pitched against a huge floor vase standing in a corner. Something tipped over in her like a full jug of water, so Anna got her face over the brim of the vase, grasped its sides with both hands, and vomited in a decidedly indecorous fashion. She coughed. The _drip-drip-drip_ against clean porcelain made her retch again.

She stayed like that, her throat burning and her whole body throbbing, until she felt a hand touch lightly on her back.

Anna jerked her head.

"Dezole,Princess. Are you ill?"

"No. I'm okay. I'm fine." She spat to clear her mouth before looking up at Marguerite. "I'm so-so-so-_so_ sorry. That was gross. I'll, uh – just let me go get a mop and a bucket of soap or something. I'll fix it."

"What, the vase?" Marguerite raised her hand. She used it brush back a stray hair from Anna's braids, a quick and business-like motion. "Kristian has been scheming how to get rid of it for years, although he did not suggest this trick yet. He will have to thank you again. But you are not sick?"

"No. No, it's okay. Really."

"Hmm."

Marguerite squatted next to her in a hush of skirts. From this distance, Anna could see a streak of gray hair running back from the crown of her head. She was probably close to forty-five, about same age as her husband.

About same age Anna's own mother would've been, too.

Marguerite kept her hand on Anna's head. She lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper.

"Are you in a family way, then? Kristian did not tell me you were married. I have some ginger root that helped when I was carrying my eldest son, though Savitri prefers chewing fennel seeds. You should see how she spits them, too. Right into the cuspidor like a man."

"No, no, no, no. It's nothing like that." The words registered in a piece-meal fashion, so that Anna found herself nodding next. "The queen is having a baby? Wow. I knew I should've brought a gift. I'm sorry. I'm really, really, really sorry."

"We will keep that between ourselves for now, I think. Magnus has yet to let the court know of it." Marguerite kept an arm around her as Anna straightened up. "Go to your quarters. I will tell them you wish to rest."

Anna wanted to thank her, too, but the words would have come out jumbled and sour-tasting, so she stayed quiet.

Maybe that was better.

* * *

She always kept a candle burning while she slept.

Anna had done it first on the night of her parent's funeral, because when she blew her light out the darkness had seemed to flood in around her like deep black water. She'd lain in bed, afraid to move, afraid to breath, and had pressed the heels of both hands against her eyes to push the thoughts back in.

They had drowned.

They had drowned, at night, in the cold and the dark. They had drowned in the cold and the dark, and maybe they had hidden together in their cabin and held each other at the end, and had watched the last light go out before the sea swallowed them.

This last moment had been enough to roll Anna from bed and send her to the door. It had put her hand on the knob with some idea of running down the hall beyond, of pounding her hands against another door and _Elsa, Elsa, Elsa._

But instead she'd turned towards the fireplace, and fallen to her knees striking the flint and steel. A spark had leaped up and ignited the dry kindling. She'd fallen asleep on the hearth much later, with the light and warmth at her back, and had lit a candle the next night, and the next: so it was really just another habit.

Still, Anna made certain to light a candle on the nightstand before lying down.

The sleeping quarters they'd given her had walls of dark, paneled wood, with fleur-de-lis carvings on the ceilings and furniture. The bed and seat coverings were blue silk, and the washstand had a silver water jug in the shape of a swan. She cleaned her face, combed her hair, and bound it in a single plait down her back.

Anna went through her evening prayers. She kept her eyes on the candle as she stretched out atop of the sheets, because it felt too hot to sleep beneath them.

She would go to sleep, and then it would be morning, and then, well. That was tomorrow, and it would come no matter what she wanted or felt. Everything would be fine.

She rolled over and found a painted ceiling staring down at her.

And, Anna reminded herself, it wouldn't be Hans who she'd miss, after that. Not really. She would miss the tall, fair stranger with the krumkake and the socks and the voice and the warm hands, and that had been a lie anyway.

There'd be no loss in that.

Anna closed her eyes, free-fell through the darkness for a moment, and felt sleep rush up to meet her.

* * *

It must have been near midnight, or early morning, when something startled her awake again.

Anna stared at the painted ceiling, which was not hers, and at the walls of the room, which was not hers either. She shifted to look at the candle on her nightstand, which would be there no matter what.

It had been snuffed out, and someone was standing above her.

Panic seized her so suddenly that she felt a taste of iron in her mouth, and when Anna opened it to scream a bare hand clamped over her face. It pushed her head back against the pillow.

"Easy now, Anna. Easy. Easy."

"H –"

The hand pressed down harder.

"We don't need to make this difficult, Anna. See?" He raised his other hand and spread his fingers to show that it was empty. "Now, listen. I'm going to step back, and you're going to stay quiet, and everything will be just fine if you can do that for me. Do you understand?"

She nodded.

He stepped away, as promised.

Anna raised herself up onto her elbows.

"What are you doing here, Hans?"

"That's not a very polite way to say hello, Anna, considering all the trouble I went through to come." He backed up further, keeping himself between her and the door. "I thought I'd stop by to give this back."

He tossed something towards her. It flashed in the dim light, and her hands reached out to clap it between her palms. When Anna opened them again, she was looking at a long, jeweled hairpin. It had been bent at the tip.

It took second for her to recognize it.

"This is mine! How'd you – "

But then Anna remembered iron manacles against her neck, a chain pulling her against his body, his lips pressing into hers with their taste of blood, and her braids coming loose when she pulled away, and -

Oh.

"Yes, I apologize for borrowing it without permission," Hans said. "I don't know any other way to pick a pin-and-tumbler lock."

He lifted one of her valises, turning it over in his hands for examination. He unsnapped the clasps and dumped its contents out between his feet.

"Hey!"

Hans took a step towards her again. "I thought I told you to keep quiet. Do you want the whole castle to hear you?"

She buttoned her lips closed again and waited for him to move first. Finally, he knelt down to search through what he'd gotten out of her traveling case. Anna pulled herself to the edge of the bed. She set one foot down on the floor, and waited: then came the other foot, and more waiting.

Right.

She stood, hands half-raised in front of her. She watched him stand too, and go rummaging through drawers, shoving the valise full of clothing as he went.

She let her gaze make a quick tour about the room. There was a lamp on the bureau that looked pretty heavy, a hoop-back chair, a vase of fresh tulips, and again that silver water jug shaped like a swan. The last one looked most promising, awkward in shape but light enough to throw if she aimed well, and heavy enough to make it worth trying.

She took two steps forward.

Three, four.

She kept her eyes on his back. The sharp edges of his shoulder blades moved beneath his shirt.

Five, six.

And when she went to take the seventh step, Hans spoke again.

"By the way, did my brother ask you to come here alone?"

Anna stopped.

Hans picked a silver candlestick off of the mantelpiece. He didn't turn to look at her, but he kept talking.

"Magnus has been very interested in you, lately. It's all he's wanted to talk about. If he weren't married, I'd almost be jealous." Hans deepened his voice into a passable imitation of the king's. "'Tell me about Queen Elsa's powers, Hans.' 'Tell me how she controls them, Hans.' 'Tell me about Princess Anna, Hans.' 'Tell me what I want to know, Hans, and I'll be gentler with your sentence.'"

"Wait." Anna tilted her head. Her feet stayed in place. "What did you just say?"

There was a comb sitting on the washstand. Hans grimaced and ran it twice through his hair. He picked up the soap too. "Yes, and you see how well that worked out."

"King Magnus – Magnus asked you –" she swallowed. "You gave him information about my sister and me?"

"Yes, I did. Sorry, Anna, but I hear decapitation is bad for a man's health. They say Ragnar the Red's head kept blinking a good thirty seconds after the ax dropped, and that's a trick I'd prefer not to try for myself. I should have known better than to believe him, of course, but there you have it."

She'd stood up before the whole court, Anna thought.

She'd made an idiot out of herself in front of nobility from three different countries. He had pulled her in with the manacle's chains, and put his hands on her, and of course that had been to suit his own ends too. He probably didn't know how to do anything else, which might have been what the lawyer in Elsa's book used as a final defense for his rats.

"Why? Why did he want to know?"

Hans turned. If he was at all surprised to see her standing, and six steps nearer to him, he did not show it on his face. Masks, she reminded herself once more. Masks upon masks upon masks.

"Did you happen notice the ships moored in our harbor?" he asked.

"Why should that matter? There's sloops, and frigates, and brigantines, and –"

"War ships, in other words."

"Yeah, and your brothers are admirals and captains and officers. What's your point?"

"My brothers," Hans said, going back to the clothes he'd scattered on the floor, "could not be bothered to come home for our father's funeral service. As flattering as I'd find it to think that they all turned up just to watch me flop around the execution block like a fish, I'm not that naïve. And I'm not trying to prove anything, either."

"Then why are you telling me this?"

Hans bowed to pick up something that lay amidst the other clothing. It was soft and blue, and Anna recognized it as a scarf that Elsa had given her, one she could tie over her hair. He tucked it into his pocket.

"Just making an observation. Jail leaves time for a man to think, you know...If nothing else, I thought I might be able to make a bit of trouble for Magnus before I left. Whatever it is he's up to."

Her hand set itself down on the washstand. It crept up the water jug's neck and curled around it, finger by finger. He still didn't look at her

"I'm not letting you leave."

Hans straightened up again.

"Yes, Anna, you –"

Then Anna brought the silver jug around in a great, flinging arc. Air hummed over the brim as it came. And Hans might have raised a hand to catch it, or blocked it with his arm, or knocked it aside with the valise. Instead he stepped back out of reach, and the jug was heavier than expected, so Anna felt herself go flinging around with it, and what happened next was this:

It flew out of her hands. It struck the vase with its fresh tulips. There was a cascading sound of broken glass, a spill of water, a deep thud against the far wall. Anna stumbled, one, two, three more steps sideways. She saw Hans's eyes go wide.

He reached out to catch her.

But his fingers closed on empty air, this time, and she toppled against the washstand. Her fall brought it to the floor, where it landed on her legs. She also managed to scream, finally, a note that made her whole skull quiver like a tuning fork, thin and keen and slicing through the quiet like a razor. She heard footsteps running down the hall, and then two soldiers flung open the door.

"Princess Anna?"

"Wait, don't -!"

Hans strode forward two paces and drove an elbow into the first man's throat. While he gasped and choked, Hans grabbed a handful of his jacket and threw him forward into the room. It cleared the way in time for a second soldier to lunge forward, his short-sword raised.

And Hans did bring the valise up this time. The blade bit through leather and cloth to come out the other side and stick fast. Hans yanked them both from the man's grip at once and flung them away, reached under an arm, wrapped a hand around one side of the man's head, and cracked his skull once against the door frame.

Hans turned, pulled the sword free with another ripping of cloth.

He wiped it on one knee and looked at Anna along its length. He drew a few heaving, shuddering breaths.

"Anyway, as I was saying – "

Then came an explosive, puncturing sound that burst the air apart like a firecracker.

Anna heard herself scream again. There was enough time to see the color sink out of Hans's face before he crumpled to the floor, dropping the sword in a clatter and clutching at his right leg. Blood seeped into the fabric of his trousers.

King Magnus stepped through the door, a percussion revolver raised in front of him.

He kicked at the dazed soldiers as he passed.

"Hurry up and get some cuffs on him, that's right. You've got a thick skull, now, come on. Stand up. Stand up." Magnus pushed at the man's head with his toe, but kept his eyes on Anna. "Princess, are you alright?"

She watched the blood stain on Hans's leg grow larger. One of the soldiers staggered to his feet, and when he lifted Hans's hand up to close it inside a shackle Anna saw that its whole palm was bright red.

"Take him to my chambers for now. Be sure you apologize to my wife when you get there." Magnus rubbed a stain of black powder off his thumb. "And send someone for Henrik, please. Ask him if he happens to know where his highest-priority prisoner has gotten off to. Tell them they're to give me an exact description of his reaction, since I won't be there to see it myself."

Hans hissed in pain when they pulled him to his feet. The leg folded under again. The soldier pulled him up a second time, grabbed him by the arms, and went out through the door dragging him.

"Princess Anna?"

Anna did not move from where she had fallen against the wash stand. Her ears rang. Her hands shook, so she clenched and unclenched them a few times to be sure they still worked. The gray scent of gunpowder swirled against the scents of cut tulip stems and crushed petals and blood.

"Princess Anna, are you alright?" Magnus dropped to a knee in front of her. The pistol dangled from his fingers. "Princess Anna?"

Once, twice, she nodded.

"Uh-huh."

"Did anything happen, Princess?"

"No. I'm fine." She tested her hands one more time, for luck. "He didn't say anything."

And she might have slumped to the floor too, after that, the space behind her eyes wiped blank and white by the noise, except for what Magnus said next.

"'Say' anything, Princess?"

She looked up at him.

She kept her fists clenched.

She felt a frown line come between her eyebrows before she was able to smooth it away, and her heart spun around in a sharp, slapping quarter-turn like a flywheel. One, two breaths, and she drew in that scent of gunpowder and fresh flowers and blood.

"No. Nothing happened, I mean."

Magnus smiled.

"I see."

Then Magnus rose, and put the pistol in his belt. His boots crushed larger shards of glass as he walked over to retrieve the silver jug, which was when Anna realized that he was still fully dressed. He circled around the room with a careful eye and set the jug down on the mantelpiece, righted the washstand. He kicked at the ruined valise, made it spin once, and put both arms behind his back.

"Excuse me, Princess. I'm sorry about this." Magnus turned to the second soldier, the one Hans had struck in the throat. He was still on all fours wheezing for air. "Viktor, if you please?"

Anna watched the man called Viktor stand up.

She watched him draw a pair of handcuffs out. She watched him walk towards her. She watched him reach down, and in a very gentlemanly fashion she watched him take up both of her hands.

Then she watched him close the iron manacles around her wrists, and their weight was cold and black.

* * *

**Well, then. Here we go.**

**Thank you for reading. Please let me know what you think. Critiques, comments, suggestions, elucidations, and ramblings are always welcome. **


	5. Chapter 5

**This is a short chapter, but it didn't quite fit with the other one. And it's darker than I was expecting it to be.**

**None of these characters belong to me.**

* * *

The king's bedchamber had three tall, latticework windows on its eastward-facing wall. Moonlight came down in sharp slices, so bright that Anna had to wait a moment for her eyes to adjust.

Paneled murals covered the other walls. The bed itself was set back in an alcove. A cold fireplace waited on the room's far side, framed by carvings in its white limestone. Queen Savitri and Prince Kay stood there, and they turned around together when the guard brought Anna. Both still wore the clothing she had seen them in earlier that day, Kay with his sash and Queen Savitri with her lace gloves. Neither appeared particularly surprised.

A third figure sat in the velvet slipper chair beside them, but her face was so masked in shadow that it took the _snap-snap-snap_ of a fan for Anna to recognize her.

"Oh, look, Hans." Lady Helene tapped her fan against a powdered cheek. "Here comes your bride."

Hans had already been dropped to the floor. His hands were shackled behind him, this time. He rested with his bleeding leg stuck out at an angle, his head bowed down between his shoulders. The other guard held him upright by the back of his collar.

Queen Savitri studied Anna for a moment, and lifted a shawl from where it hung on a chair. "Shame on you, Viktor. You should have let her dress. Princess Anna is a lady."

She opened the shawl between her arms, skirts swaying around her as she came forward to place it over Anna's shoulders.

Anna flinched away. Her chains rattled. "No, thank you."

Savitri stopped abruptly. Her sunstone earrings clicked together in the silence. The shawl was red silk, to match her dress, embroidered with yellow suns, and she gathered it up against her chest.

"Ah. I am sorry."

"Don't bother, Savitri," called Prince Kay. He strode towards them, passing through the light and shadow in long, spring-heeled strides. "But Lucky Thirteen's bleeding all over your floor. Isak, haven't you got something to stop him up with?"

"That's right, Isak. This is a Guli Farang rug. I'd hate to be the one responsible for ruining it," Hans said in a tilting voice.

Anna looked down at him.

His face had turned almost white. A gloss of sweat covered his forehead and wicked the hair around his neck. The muscles of his back seemed to contract with each breath. He kept his eyes fixed on his mother, although Lady Helene was not returning his gaze. She looked at some point through the window, instead, posed with the easy indifference of a porcelain doll. _Snap-snap-snap_ went her fan.

Anna edged closer to the guard. "There should be a blue scarf in his pocket…No, the other one. He stole it from my luggage. See if you can use that."

Isak nodded, drew her scarf out with two fingers, and bound it around the wound. Blood colored its shimmering fabric in an instant. Hans did not give the action any acknowledgement.

Kay gestured towards her with his left hand, the one missing part of its index finger. The remaining ones were long and knobby beside it. "Thank you, Princess. I'll be sure it's returned to you."

Anna grimaced. "I don't want it anymore."

"I understand." And he smiled at her, showing small, straight teeth, which together with the fingers and the stride suggested a kind of efficient brutality. "I wouldn't either."

The door opened again. Viktor suddenly took Anna by the shoulders and pushed her aside, allowing Magnus to pass. He did not glance at any of them, although he did step neatly over a growing stain of blood on the rug, but crossed the room to lift something off a bedside table. Squinting, Anna saw that it was a white meerschaum pipe whittled into the shape of a bird.

He went to a writing desk next and shook its jammed drawer free. He lifted out a sack of tobacco, along with a metal tamper. He portioned some out into his hand, careful and meticulous, and began to fill the pipe.

"Leave us, please." Magnus did not lift his eyes from what he was doing. "I'll summon you back when I require you."

Isak and Viktor gave matching bows before they left. There was the click of a lock as Anna felt the door shut behind her.

Her bare toes curled against the carpet.

Magnus straightened, brushing a few leaves of tobacco from his coat lapels. He pulled a match out of his pocket. It gave a hoarse gasp when he struck it, firelight kicking up into his eyes when he laid it against the pipe's bowl. Blue smoke curled from between his lips. He shook the match out just before it burned his fingertips, filling the room with a smell of sulfide, and then he peered over at the fireplace.

"It's too dark in here," Magnus said, around the pipe stem. "Savitri, if you'd be so kind?"

He exchanged a look with his wife.

Savitri slipped the shawl around her own shoulders but did not move, so Magnus lowered the pipe to smile at her.

He seemed to nod, very slightly.

Then, her sunstone earrings throwing light as she went, Savitri walked back to the fireplace. She removed her long lace gloves, turning them inside out when she plucked them off. She tucked her skirts under her knees, the way a well-bred girl was taught to while kneeling. She pushed aside a black curl of hair and slipped the shawl's trailing ends beneath her arms. She laid both small, bare hands over the coals, and stayed like that for one, two, three, four breaths.

And when Queen Savitri drew her hands away again, the coals were pulsing with fire.

"No," Anna heard herself say. She took another step back. "No, no, no."

Kay inspected his thumbnail. Lady Helene stirred the coals with an iron poker, throwing sparks out onto the hearthstones and grinding them under the heel of her white kidskin boot. Magnus sighed another plume of smoke. Anna glanced to her left and saw that Hans, at least, had the manners to look somewhat perplexed, although the blood loss may have been a factor.

She tried to speak again. But her thoughts broke into fragments, like river ice, the pieces lining up along jagged edges before drifting apart again:

(_"I do hereby request the presence of her highness, Princess Anna of Arendelle," _the letter had said, and she had answered it. _"They say the queen can turn an ocean to ice,"_ Klaus had said. _"My grandmother used to tell me about the snow witches who lived up north, at the top of the world,"_ Jens had said, and she had answered them both _"Your father was a very good man, yes?"_ Queen Savitri had asked, and she had answered her. _"By the way, did my brother ask you to come here alone?"_ Hans had asked, and she may as well have answered him, too. And then – )

"'No'? That's not the reaction I anticipated from you, Princess Anna," Magnus said. "I thought it seemed only fair. Your people have their old stories about the snow witches, and the people of Sempore have their fire worshippers. The West India Company had her weaving cotton in a textile mill, if you can believe that. Kristian found her for me."

Savitri looked down at her hands with something like shyness. "A little gift. Not so much as your sister can do, Princess. Or as my mother could. They are only small, little things."

Magnus knelt to kiss the corner of Savitri's mouth, and he helped her to her feet. Her hands almost disappeared inside of his.

"Never mind. We'll be patient." A curl of his thick, pale hair brushed her forehead. "Well done."

The sharp fragments of ice swung together, locked for a moment, and split apart again.

(- And then there had been Anders placing his hand on Anna's shoulder, a silent request. There had been a little handkerchief sewn with pink flowers. There had been another set of hands, shaking inside white gloves, and the open surprise on Hans's face after they read his sentence. There had been the touch of cold iron cuffs against her cheek, and Elsa's cold arms around her as she said goodbye, as she said – )

Anna's ribcage seemed to be curling in, all of her joints coming unlocked, and perhaps this would be enough to wake her up soon. Until then, she drew a long breath.

(-"_Come back," _Elsa had said to her. _"Come back."_)

"What do you –"

Magnus shifted sideways to face Anna, his eyebrows raised.

" – What do you want from my sister?"

Smoke drifted up around him, turning gold the firelight.

"That's secondary to what your sister wants from me at the moment, Princess Anna. But I don't want to spoil the ending." Magnus gestured toward her with the pipe. "I'll have Viktor take those cuffs off, if it's any consolation. There's no need to treat you like a common criminal in the meantime."

Kay had leaned against the wall and crossed his legs at the ankles. He bit at the thumbnail he'd been inspecting. "Magnus? Are you sure?"

"I am." Magnus walked towards the door. "How many men would you say accompanied you here, Princess?"

Anna couldn't move back any farther. She tried anyway, and felt the door's carvings dig against her shoulder blades.

"I don't have to tell you that."

Kay and Magnus exchanged a look. Both of them laughed, loudly and openly like children, and out of the corner of her eye Anna saw Hans jump at the sound. Magnus covered his mouth with one hand.

"We're sorry, Princess," Kay said. "You're just a bit smarter than we expected you to be, that's all. Hans really didn't give you enough credit."

"Quite," Magnus added. "But it's alright. I happen to know the exact figure - you arrived with an entourage of seven men, including your chief mate Anders… Folkestad, was that it? Or maybe it was Fjerstad. Klaus showed me the ship manifest that you gave him. Either way, I promise we'll keep them all safe while you're here."

He paused. The skin of his face was strained across the temples, around his brow, the way a goldsmith's face usually looked. And there was a kind of weight to his pause, Anna thought, like the space between swings of a pendulum, so she leaned back more against the door.

"But?"

"But if you take it into your head to try anything rash and make me regret being lenient with you, I'll have one of their hands cut off." He made another gesture with the pipe, dropping ash on the floor. "I think that's much more practical than just killing my leverage, and it leaves room for twice as many offenses."

"Four times as many, counting their eyes," Kay said. "That's economic of you."

Magnus craned his neck to look back over one shoulder. "Not something I learned from Father, eh? But please don't make me do that, Princess. I know we can keep everything civil so long as you behave yourself."

Anna rocked her head back against the door, so that she was looking him in the eyes. She figured she was close enough to kick at his shins, or to strike the pipe from his hands, or maybe even launch herself at him like a spitting cat, but she didn't want any part of her body to touch him.

She was spared the decision when Hans laughed, a harsh and sawing sound that shook its way out of him and ended in a long, ragged, breath.

"Oh, Magnus," he said. His voice made Anna think of firelight, of a hand on her face. "What are you doing? You and I both know this country can't afford a war."

"As a matter of fact, I do. I also happen to remember when it could. I remember the kingdom our father inherited, which is why I don't really expect you to understand any of this..."

He bent down in front of his brother, legs straight with both hands clasping his knees. Anna noted again the similarity of their profiles, although there was a certain precision to Hans's that Anna could only find mirrored in the woman across the room.

"...But then we lost the Second Jutland War, and we lost the Rendsburg War along all with our claims to the North Sea, so we sold our territory on the Gold Coast to cover its cost." Magnus stayed like that, bowed over his brother, but his face and posture gave the impression of a flag pulled taut in the wind. "Then Father threw it all away and I, Hans, I had the inestimable privilege of inheriting what was left."

He stood and walked away.

"Now, your execution was supposed to be a way of giving the people a display of my equanimity, even when it comes to my own kin, but Niels reminded me that you're not the best subject to use for that lesson...So what should do with you, Hans? Any ideas?"

Hans tried to put himself upright. "Kill me, if that'll shut you up."

Magnus came to a stop before the fireplace and stood there, arms behind his back again. Anna watched another comma of smoke rise from the pipe, clouding the back of his head from view.

"I've been thinking about that. You'd be amazed how many men claim to have no fear of death until they try it for themselves." He tapped his thumb, one, two, three, four times against his wrist. "But since you asked so courteously, I think I'll let you live instead. We'll just have to disappoint the crowds tomorrow with an announcement that you managed to escape sometime during the night."

And here there was another pause, another drop of the pendulum. Magnus drew on the pipe again, blew out the smoke, and glanced over at his brother. "Kay."

"Yes?"

Magnus pointed an elbow towards where Hans sat. "If you don't mind."

Kay pushed himself away from the wall.

"Not a bit."

He crossed the room again in several of those snapping strides, moonlight glancing off of him so that he seemed to appear and vanish in unsteady flickers like a moth. He came closer, silent, both hands at his side until he stood in front of Hans, and he bent to grip those spidery fingers through Hans's hair.

In one hard yank, he had pulled him to his feet. He forced Hans's head left, right, back, as though in appraisal.

"God, you really did shave your face for the headsmen, didn't you? I couldn't bring myself to believe Henrik when he told us."

Lady Helene, who had remained silent, snapped open her fan and looked through its lace edge. "I can see why you were carried away with him, Princess Anna. I suppose I should take some responsibility for the whole ugly business, shouldn't I? He always did keep himself well-hidden behind that pretty face."

Kay laughed again. "That's Lucky Thirteen for you. Never ran into a problem he didn't think he could charm your way out of."

He glanced at Anna, and searched her face for something. He looked over at Lady Helene, at Magnus, at the room, at the slanting moonlight. Then, gradually, his gaze settled on the fireplace with its glowing embers.

Hans flattened his lips over his teeth. His breath came in a hard, sharp gasp, and a clarity seemed to seize his whole body.

"...Wait."

"Savitri, please leave. Viktor will escort Princess Anna to her quarters," said Magnus, backing clear of the hearth. "This isn't something either of you need to see."

Savitri fixed the shawl around her shoulders. Kay pulled his brother forward, and they passed each other in the middle of the room. Hans tried to dig in a heel, to sink out of Kay's hold, but this put weight on the wounded leg and he staggered. Kay did not loosen the grip on his hair.

"Wait," Hans repeated. "No, no, no. Magnus, tell him to stop. I'll do whatever you say."

"Listen to that, would you?" Magnus finished his pipe and dumped it out over the coals. The leaves all burned up in a flash. "He'll behead a girl when she's not looking, but get a fire going and he turns into a model diplomat. You might have made a good king after all, Hans."

Savitri reached Anna and put an arm around her, which Anna could not summon the energy to shrug off. She saw Kay drag Hans all the way across the floor as he struggled, hobbled and limping and gasping for air, and bring him to his knees on the flagstone. Hans's voice began tightening in turns, like a screw digging into wood, and he jerked his head sideways to face Lady Helene.

"Mother, Mother, please say something."

"Don't whine, Hans." Lady Helene reached over to chuck him beneath the chin with her fan. "It's unbecoming in a man."

Then _snap_, and she rose from her chair to leave.

Hans was breathing so quickly now that his lungs did not seem to fill, and he threw himself back from the fireplace one more time. The blue scarf around his leg had turned almost black with blood. He overbalanced, fell onto his side, and when Hans looked up at Anna through the moonlight his expression was as wild and startled and conscious as a child's.

And maybe Hans opened his mouth, and maybe he started to speak, but then he shut it again and said nothing.

_("Oh, Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.")_

Anna saw Kay place his other hand on Hans's shoulder. He pulled him to his feet. This last moment made the windows, and the paneled walls, and most of all that near future into which Magnus had so firmly placed her, seem to grow small and dark.

"Come, Princess,"Savitri whispered. "We will go now."

Anna turned to leave.

"No, no, no," she heard, although it came to her like sound carried over a frozen lake. "No, no, please, no."

But she glanced back just in time to watch Prince Kay shove a tall, fair stranger's face down into the burning coals, and through the closed door between them she could hear him scream.

* * *

**Oof. I honestly didn't know Kay was going to do that until about a paragraph beforehand, while I was planning this chapter out. I upped the rating on this, just in case. **

**King Magnus was referring to agni hotris in India, who carry out ceremonies and rituals to the Hindu god of fire and sacrifices, Agni, although I'm not sure how far his own understanding extends. I also tried to allude to Savitri's abilities (her name means "of the sun"), and I hope it fits with the rest of the story, but I actually found it harder to believe that Elsa was the only person in this entire canonical universe with elemental abilities. More on the mythos and magic later.**

**We should be getting back to Elsa in the next chapter. And Kristoff, who I haven't forgotten about. **

**As always, thank you for reading. **


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